


Waking Up Slow

by odetteandodile



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Badass Peggy Carter, Blow Jobs, Bucky Barnes Feels, Canon Divergence - Captain America: The First Avenger, Captain America Steve Rogers/Modern Bucky Barnes, Dad Bucky Barnes, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, First Time, Fluff and Angst, Found Family, Frottage, Hand Jobs, Hurt/Comfort, Kid Fic, Let Steve Rogers Rest, M/M, Memory Loss, Pepper Potts Is a Good Bro, Shrunkyclunks, Slow Burn, Slow Dancing, Snowed In, Steve Rogers Feels, Steve's plane isn't found, avengers cameos - Freeform, they both hold a baby a lot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-16
Updated: 2019-02-16
Packaged: 2019-10-27 22:50:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 44,638
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17775716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/odetteandodile/pseuds/odetteandodile
Summary: In 1945 Steve Rogers crashed the Valkyrie into the Arctic Ocean and was never recovered.In 2019 Bucky Barnes is walking along the beach below the decommissioned lighthouse where he lives with his sixteen month old daughter when he finds the body of a man washed up in the surf, half frozen but miraculously alive.Bucky manages to revive him, but finds that the stranger has no memory of who he is or how he got here aside from a name: Steve. Snowed in by a blizzard soon after and unable to get Steve a medevac, Bucky discovers that the funny, good-hearted man slips into the fabric of his and Alice’s life faster than he would have thought possible. The two are undeniably drawn to each other, but as their feelings grow so does the looming possibility that the answer to the question “who is Steve?” might be much more complicated than either of them realized.





	1. In the Arms of the Ocean

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to my contribution to the 2019 Stucky AU Big Bang! This club has everything: a lighthouse! bearded Bucky! sweaters! a baby! learning to dance! taking care of each other while sick! and, obviously, lots of falling in love. I honestly hope you guys love this fic as much as I have! 
> 
> Beautiful, lovingly detailed lighthouse art from crankyfractal [here](http://odette-and-odile.tumblr.com/post/182924252318/crankyfractal-art-for-chapter1-and-chapter3)!
> 
> And some utter sweetness from oh--stars can be found [here](http://odette-and-odile.tumblr.com/post/182924330773/ohstars-waking-up-slow-my-art-for-an-amazing)!!
> 
> Playlist of accompanying music can be found [on spotify](https://open.spotify.com/user/ctwls3bilnny431vd7z1trz55/playlist/2AavF0H5fJ8ooy1xN7eMKW?si=A2uLh30GQDOq1Yk7NVtYOw) for your listening pleasure.

**1945**

_“Peggy,” Steve hesitates, not sure how to fill the crackling, taut silence over the channel, “I’m gonna need a rain check on that dance.”_

_Peggy plays along, but Steve can hear the grief in her voice, how she’s keeping herself from crying—holding out these last few moments until after, when Steve won’t be there on the line to hear any more._

_There is a bank of white in front of him, the sliver of blue sky at the top of the windshield growing slimmer and slimmer as he angles downward. He isn’t sure if it’s land or sea ice, and his failing control panel doesn’t offer any guidance. It doesn’t really matter—it’s an empty canvas with nothing to harm, waiting to swallow him up._

_“We’ll have the band play something slow.” Steve doesn’t really even know what he’s saying anymore, just a last flickering resistance against the vast still silence in front of him. “Wouldn’t want to step on your—”_

_He’s aware for one blazing moment of a wall of furious white pressure slamming into him._

_Then nothing._

*

**2019**

Bucky picks his way down the rocky slope to the beach, keeping his feet to the softer snow that’s least likely to be too slick for a foothold.

Alice coos softly to herself next to his ear, her small heels kicking at his waist happily from where she’s tucked up against his back. She reaches around, attempting to grab a fistful of his beard as well, but can’t quite manage it with her mittens on. She’s gotten quite grabby these past two months and he thinks daily how he should just go back to keeping a clean shave. That a startling amount of salt has crept in with the pepper despite the fact that he’s only just waved goodbye to thirty doesn’t help. It just feels like a lot of work when it’s only the two of them to see.

He’s grateful that they’re finally getting at least a little bit of a break in the weather so she can be out long enough for him to stretch his legs. Though the days are still just below freezing, it feels practically balmy after the long stretch of a winter on the subarctic Labrador coast. It’s even warm enough that he might be able to do some fishing this week, which would be a nice change of pace.

Bucky notices that he’s humming to himself tunelessly, and laughs a little. Spending the last not quite year almost exclusively with Alice has definitely rubbed off on him in unexpected ways. He reaches up behind him and gives her little mittened hand a squeeze, eliciting a pleased stream of chatter. At 16 months, she has opinions to share on just about everything, at length, but only about five actual words. Bucky tries to savor the wordless babble, these waning months of still being more baby in some ways than toddler.

_I love to wake up in the wildwood, over fields of ice and snow  
And my heart will always be there where the mountain breezes blow_

Bucky’s breath puffs out thick and white as he sings and Alice pats him on the head in approval.

They’re on the beach now, though calling it that is somewhat generous. It’s not anything like the sandy stretches he’d grown up visiting in the summers of his New York childhood. But it isn’t a jagged cliff that drops directly into the sea like most of the surrounding area, so he supposes it’s still technically accurate.

The water is quiet today, deceptively innocent. He’s seen the waves raging along this same shore, completely engulfing this spit and crashing nearly 30 feet above where they stand now. But today there’s barely even a wave lapping at the rocks and he can see all the way out to where remnants of the year’s ice pack still clusters offshore, slowly cracking and disappearing for the season.

Bucky returns his eyes to the ground, absently searching for any interesting driftwood or other ocean detritus that’s washed up since the last storm. He leans over to pocket an iridescent fragment of abalone shell to add to their collection.

His eyes roam a little further—then he freezes.

There’s a large shape half on the sand ahead of him that for half a beat he thinks must be driftwood or a seal, before realizing it is distinctly human shaped.

Shit. Bucky sprints forward, heart pounding rapidly—a distant corner of his mind is glad that Alice is too young to understand what’s happening, the fact that they have almost certainly just stumbled on the corpse of some unfortunate fisherman or hiker. Nothing survives the temperatures of this water for long—the cold paralyzes within 15 minutes, kills well within an hour.

Which is why Bucky is entirely unprepared to lean over the hunched body, still being lightly buffeted by the creeping waves, and see a small white puff of breath coming from the man’s mouth.

“ _Shit_ ,” Bucky says, aloud this time. “Shit fuck.”

Bucky seizes the man under the armpits, yanking him back out of the frigid water as best he can. He’s stiff and waterlogged, and not a small-boned person in the first place. But Bucky knows the improbability of having found him alive at all only turns into a greater improbability of _keeping_ him that way each moment that he remains in this bone-aching cold.

Bucky looks back over his shoulder toward the lighthouse, the distance that had seemed so easy to close on the way down now stretching out like miles. But he’s got to do what he can—neither he nor this man have any other options, miles from the nearest emergency aid. _Please don’t die on me_ , Bucky pleads silently.

There’s no time to think more about it, one way or another. He crouches to get a firmer grip under the man’s arms, dragging him backward as quickly as he can manage without running the risk of stumbling and falling directly back on top of Alice. He maintains a steady stream of expletives under his breath as he moves, his heart pounding in his ears.

Alice, seemingly catching his excitement, shrieks and tugs on his hair, but he doesn’t notice. He’s too busy thinking ahead, how to warm the guy up properly, assuming he can get him to the house before he fades. He tries to remember his abbreviated cold safety tutorial, how to combat frostbite and hypothermia—he won’t have time to run upstairs and google it, not when the margin here is probably minutes. Bucky redoubles his efforts, arms burning with the strain.

At last he reaches the final stretch to his door where the path flattens out, the man’s body sliding helpfully over the slick crust of snow.

He kicks the door open behind him, dragging the man over the threshold, bypassing the mudroom where they would normally spend several minutes shaking off snow and their outdoor layers, straight into the house. A blast of heat hits Bucky, making his face flush under his parka and the exertion of carrying 200-odd pounds of dead weight. But he doesn’t stop, continuing to lug the man down the narrow hallway into the lower bathroom.

When they reach it, he lets him slide to the floor while he yanks off the man’s brown leather boots and socks, but opts to leave the rest of his clothes on for the moment.

It’s a trick and a half getting his bulk and limbs up and over the side of the tub, but Bucky manages it. He glances anxiously at the man’s blue lips and eyelids, his stark white cheeks and the frost in his light hair. Bucky spins the knobs on the faucet, twiddling until the water is running somewhere between tepid and lukewarm.

The key as far as he can remember is to warm a person exposed to extreme cold up slowly a bit at a time, to get their blood flowing normally and feeling back into their limbs. You’re not supposed to dunk them straight into a hot bath, but then you’re also supposed to just get them to a hospital and that isn’t really an option. So he’ll just do his best to take it slow, trunk first, then extremities.

Over his shoulder, Alice has now graduated to less than pleased protests—confused by the break in their normal routine and unhappy that she’s still trapped in her carrier even though they’ve returned to the house.

Bucky watches the tub filling, torn between figuring out what should come next and trying to take a moment to settle Alice so he can tend to it unencumbered. He feels for a pulse and finds one, stronger and steadier than he expected, though still extremely slow.

Bucky hesitates, then hurries out—unstrapping Alice’s pack from his back and stripping her out of her snow gear in the middle of the living room. He glances at the clock and decides that it’s close enough to nap time to give it a shot at least, and snatches a bottle of milk from the fridge on his way to her room, depositing her in her crib. He can hear her raising her voice at him as he shuts the door, but not screaming, so he hopes she’ll be distracted enough for the moment not to have to come right back.

The tub is nearly full when Bucky skids back into the bathroom, shucking his own coat in the process. He’s burning up, but figures that’s a good thing for his ice giant.

Bucky tries to take a moment to slow his breathing, to calm down and take stock of what he needs to do at this point. The guy is fully submerged in the lukewarm water, but still dressed. Eventually Bucky will need to get him out of his wet things and into something dry, hopefully conscious enough at some point to eat something hot. His mind is roving over the contents of his refrigerator trying to think what would suffice when the man gives a small gasp, head lolling back against the tub and startling Bucky half to death.

He drops to his knees and lifts one of the man’s hands to inspect it. Bucky chafes it between his palms, but finds that it’s already fairly warm, with no telltale edging of black frostbite on any of his fingers. _How fucking lucky can you get_ , Bucky thinks with a frowning. There is color returning to his lips and eyelids as well, slowly but surely. He must have _just_ collapsed, Bucky thinks. Maybe he’d been out hiking for some reason and tried to make his way to the lighthouse, slipping on one of the rocks on the beach.

But Bucky notices that his clothes don’t really seem like a hiker’s. He’s wearing blue sort of utility pants that are extremely ragged, they look like they’ve been dragging through underbrush for a lot longer than this past morning. And he’s wearing only a dark blue long john shirt—though maybe he had shed his coat when he’d ended up in the water so as not to be pulled down by the weight.

The bath is cooling rapidly, so Bucky drains some off, adding fresh water to it, a little warmer this time. The man makes another soft noise under his breath and his eyelids almost flutter. Bucky smiles involuntarily with relief—it seems less and less like he’s actively on death’s door as the minutes pass.

That means that the question of what to do with him next is going to become more pressing soon. Bucky needs to sort out clothes, food, and somewhere to put him after he’s dry.

He looks him over, assessing. He’s tall and broad-shouldered, as Bucky already established having to carry him the 300 yards from the beach. But Bucky thinks he can probably wear some of his baggier clothes—they’re about of a height, if different proportions.

Bucky drops his soggy coat and kicks off his boots in the mudroom on his way across the cottage into the lighthouse. He takes the tower stairs up to his bedroom two at a time, quickly picking up what he needs—underwear, long johns, sweatpants, a thick sweater, wool socks, a hat for good measure. While he’s at it he grabs the baby monitor and tucks it in his back pocket. From the sound of it Alice is in fact sleeping happily and he’d probably be able to hear her downstairs if she weren’t, but it’s a force of habit. 

He carries the soft stack back down the spiral stairs and into the main house. He drops it all immediately on the counter when he enters the bathroom again to find that the man’s eyes are slightly open, half-lidded and unfocused, but definitely awake.

“Hey!” Bucky says, dropping down beside him again. “Hey can you hear me?”

The eyelids flutter again and his head lists slightly toward the sound of Bucky’s voice, but he doesn’t give more recognition than that at the moment.

Bucky purses his lips, undecided. He thinks it’s time to get the guy dry, but it’d be great if he’s waking up and could help out…

He shakes himself. In for a penny, in for a pound. He’ll just have to do his best and if the man wakes up enough to do some of it himself, that’ll just be an unexpected boon. He opens the drain to let the water out of the tub and starts easing the hem of the ripped blue shirt up over the guy’s head.

Bucky allows himself one moment to take in his chest and abs in the interest of getting a clue as to who his guest is, because _goddamn_ you do _not_ get a body like that from hiking. Or fishing.

But he doesn’t linger too long—there’ll be time to figure out what his deal is and how he got here later—moving on to try unsuccessfully to remove the soaked, heavy pants. Eventually he gives up and reaches for a pair of scissors from a drawer, slicing them open from waistband to hem down both legs. They weren’t going to be salvageable anyway and the water is basically totally drained now leaving him at the mercy of the air.

Unfortunately for Bucky and his overworked arm muscles, the man doesn’t regain consciousness in time to dress himself. Somehow Bucky wrestles his limp form back out of the tub to dry and dress him anyway, a feat driven almost entirely by adrenaline and the absolute necessity of life and death.

It feels worse for some reason, now that he’s dried and dressed, to drag him by the shoulders back down the hall, so Bucky maneuvers him into a rough bridal carry. He staggers under his weight, but he doesn’t have to go far, depositing him on the sofa in front of the fireplace. He bundles him up in the two blankets draped over the back of the couch and cracks a couple of heat packs from a kitchen drawer to tuck in at his fingers and toes.

Bucky’s mind is darting through contingencies, what else he could and should do to increase the likelihood of this person he’s suddenly responsible for actually surviving (a theme of his year, as a small sardonic corner of his mind points out). He’s still riding the frantic wave of adrenaline that swept through him the moment he realized there was actual breath coming from this frozen stranger. It takes him a moment before it dawns on him that…his worry might be unfounded at this point.

He frowns, peering at the face on the couch pillow. There’s no longer any sign of blue at his mouth, though it’s still a bit pale. When Bucky presses the back of his hand to one cheek, he finds that it doesn’t feel any more frozen than his own when he comes in from a good walk outdoors. Chilly, but not alarming. This guy is either _really_ healthy, _really_ lucky, or some combination of the two to be bouncing back so well so quickly.

Bucky forces himself to breathe a little slower and recognize that _he’s not going to die on you_.

“Where the fuck did you come from?” Bucky murmurs under his breath and tucks in the blankets a little closer around his shoulders.

With the active fear of him dying bleeding away, Bucky is able to take in the figure and face asleep on his couch and notice that yeah, whoever he is, he’s…very handsome.

Aside from the brief moment of admiring his chiseled torso, Bucky had tried to be very objective and clinical out of respect while he’d undressed and re-dressed him. His face alone is cut like an avenging angel, strong jaw and brow contrasted with a fair complexion and a bow shaped mouth. His hair, drying out now in the warmth of the living room, is a soft gold. Bucky wonders again how on earth someone like him came to be alone out here of all places, washed up on Bucky’s 100-yard-long beach.

Reality snaps him back in the form of Alice’s soft waking-up sounds coming over the baby monitor in his back pocket. Bucky sighs. Now that there isn’t the threat of imminent death on his hands, he can return to worries of a lower order—like the fact that having Alice take an early, too short nap is going to mean having a messy, impossible baby later in the day. But obviously it was for a worthy cause.

Bucky hustles to get a fire built in the fireplace across from the sofa before she wakes up all the way, shutting the protective grate once a good crackling blaze starts to take hold. He’s able to pull a few meals from the freezer to thaw on the counter and goes to fetch her from her crib well before she starts crying in earnest.

Alice is subdued and unusually clingy, reacting against the upset of their normal routine, so Bucky lets her cling, propped on his hip as he does his best to cut squash one handed. If he’s honest with himself, he feels a little bit of the same really. And he didn’t even get a nap after the excitement. He turns his head to burrow his nose briefly in her fine, light brown curls where they rest on his shoulder.

He’s speaking to her softly, explaining what he’s doing—how he’s going to cut up this squash for the oven, how he hopes she hasn’t decided she hates it since yesterday like she did with yogurt recently, and so on. Bucky was never one for baby talk especially and now that she’s getting close to speaking herself, the books specifically say the more normal talking she hears the better. It’s not like it’s hard to remember—he doesn’t exactly have a glut of other conversation partners. Talking to himself/Alice is how he keeps his own powers of speech from rusting with decay.

He’s just explaining the various things he’s shaking onto the pieces of squash, “Olive oil, garlic salt, and just a liiiittle bit of basil, don’t worry you’ll like it—” when a groan from the couch interrupts him. Bucky looks over across the kitchen counter into the living room, startled to see the blonde man sitting up, running a hand over his face.

“Hey, don’t—” Bucky drops the garlic salt to the counter in his rush, “don’t move too fast, pal—you’ve had a rough day, take it easy…”

The man looks over at him, brow furrowed and eyes a little hazy. When he grips the back of the couch and swings his legs off as if to stand, Bucky makes a helpless noise of protest. Distractedly, he plops Alice down in her pack-n-play, where she immediately begins to fret. He quickly puts firm hands on the guy’s shoulders, pushing him back down to sit.

“Hey,” he says again, peering up into his face, trying to get some spark of recognition that the guy hears and understands him. Even if he doesn’t speak any English, Bucky hopes his tone should convey what he means. “You need to stay down, alright?”

The man blinks at him rapidly a few times, pupils finally narrowing in to focus on Bucky’s face. His eyes are a bright, ludicrous blue. He swallows and nods, and stops trying to stand, so Bucky relaxes his grip.

“Wh—” the man starts, the sound coming out as a rasp. He clears his throat and tries again. “Where am I?”

Bucky sighs in relief. “You speak English, that’s helpful. Um—you’re about 10 miles south of Elliston…” No response, so Bucky continues, “Labrador? Canada?”

The man shakes his head slightly. “Why?”

Bucky gives an involuntary bark of laughter. “Buddy, I got no clue. I pulled you out of the ocean half-frozen to death about three hours ago—were you hiking? Or on a boat maybe?”

Another headshake. “I don’t…I don’t remember. It was cold.”

“Yeah, I’ll fucking bet it was. You…you got a name?”

“Yeah…” his face scrunches a little in concentration, causing Bucky’s concern to spike again. “I—Steve.” He says at last and his forehead relaxes from its tense lines a bit. “My name is Steve.”

“Okay,” Bucky smiles in what he hopes is an encouraging way, “that’s good, that’s a start Steve. I’m sure it’ll come back to you when you’ve rested up a bit, get some food in you maybe. How do you feel?”

“I…I don’t know.” Steve looks up at Bucky, pinning him with those bright blue eyes and looking incredibly lost. It’s a vulnerable expression and Bucky automatically reaches out to squeeze his shoulder, reassuring him.

“That’s okay. We’ll figure that out, too. How ’bout you lay back down, huh?”

Steve obeys, shifting stiffly so he can stretch again on the couch. His head has just hit the pillow propped on the arm when Alice gives an angry, ear splitting scream of rage from her baby-prison. Bucky’s head swivels to the sound, frustrated, but Steve rockets up from the couch, alarm all over his face.

“It’s okay!” Bucky exclaims, his hands out in a pacifying motion, “it’s the baby, she’s just mad—nothing to worry about, it’s alright.”

The hunted look is a little slower to fade than Bucky would like to see, but Steve settles back down onto the sofa eventually, nodding. “Sorry,” he says.

Bucky flicks him a look from the corner of his eye and he moves to pick Alice up again. “Like I said, rough day,” he says, neutrally.

He rocks a howling Alice on his hip, cajoling her, and return to the kitchen thinking, _Barnes, what have you gotten yourself into?_

*

Steve doesn’t say much over the rest of the day. He soon drifts back into an uneasy sleep, Bucky keeping an eye on his restless form from the kitchen as he finishes cooking.

He eats a shocking amount, though, when Bucky wakes him up for food. Bucky starts him out on a bowl of soup, which he practically inhales, before fixing him a plate of the roasted squash and turkey he and Alice are eating, and then another, and then a final bowl of cereal. Bucky watches it all disappear into him a little impressed, but figures it’s got to be a good sign about his returning strength. His body probably burned up all the fuel it had keeping his heart going while in the water.

Afterward, Bucky feeds the fire in the hearth and takes up a seat in the armchair across from Steve, settling Alice in his lap to read to her. She’s been fussing on and off the better part of the afternoon, as predicted, but he hopes he’ll get an early bedtime out of her at least.

He’s barely finished _Blueberries for Sal_ , when he feels her growing heavy with sleep in his lap. Bucky smiles, kissing the top of her head and shutting the book.

Glancing over, he finds that Steve has also drifted back to sleep, looking much less restless this time, body heavy and face smushed into the pillow. Bucky chuckles softly to himself. Looks like they’re all in for an early night then.

He starts to gather up Alice to get her changed and put to bed, when he hesitates. He’s probably a really shitty dad if he puts her in her crib upstairs across the house from him while a completely random stranger sleeps in the living room right? Damn, he hadn’t thought about it before he’d set Steve up on the couch. Although he wouldn’t really have had much of a choice given that he was carrying him at the time. Still, if he has to stay another night before they can get a medevac out here maybe Bucky will figure out a more cautious arrangement. He guesses that means Alice will be bunking with him tonight. Which means he’ll spend his night getting kicked in the face by tiny baby feet, because Alice is a raging bed hog. Ah well, the sacrifices of fatherhood.

“Come on Ali-gal,” he whispers, hoisting her up onto his shoulder. “Bed time.”

She’s pliant and sleepy in his hands as he gets her changed into pajamas, and he scoops up her diaper bag from the corner of her room as well, checking that it’s stocked. They haven’t used it since their last supply run almost six weeks ago, but it’s still got all the right stuff in it.

Bucky also grabs an extra quilt from the hall closet on the landing. He pauses on their way through the living room to tuck it in around Steve, who doesn’t even stir. Bucky reaches out tentatively to press the back of his hand to Steve’s cheeks and neck, but his temperature feels good—a little warm even.

He does his best not to bang into anything with the diaper bag on his way up the narrow stairs of the tower, thinking absently about how to rearrange all of their sleeping locations tomorrow for his own sanity. He loves Alice more than life itself, but he does _not_ love sleeping in the same bed or same room or even same side of the house as her. She is a very active sleeper. He glances into the library-slash-den-slash-office level of the lighthouse as he climbs past, wondering if he could stick Steve in there tomorrow and call that good enough. At least he wouldn’t be leaving Steve and Alice together in the main house with himself over here.

Of course that would put the stranger instead right below him, which he also doesn’t love. Bucky laughs at himself a little, shaking his head. Wow has he gotten spoiled by isolation. Living in New York he wouldn’t have thought twice about having someone one wall away from him, but here, after almost a year of solitude, the fact that there is another human within even a one mile radius feels strange.

Bucky thinks about it after he’s tucked them both up in bed, Alice safely cushioned on one side by a pillow buffer and on the other by his body, as he attempts to read.

Is he lonely? He isn’t sure. He’s not exactly _un_ happy. But he isn’t certain he’s happy, either. Still, that isn’t so unexpected. It’s been just under a year since they lost Jen and Bucky suddenly found himself a single parent, desperate to escape the city and to recalibrate. But despite the circumstances that brought them here, it’s been good in its way. The solitude, the isolation, have been what he needed.

But having another body in the house, a reminder of life outside of their little world is making him think about the tenuousness of their life. One day, he’s always known, Alice will need more than just him. She’ll need friends, a school, activities, a normal childhood, other women to look up to. But he’s not ready quite yet.

He hadn’t been a good father before the accident, and he hadn’t been a particularly good husband for a long time before that. Bucky and Jen had married just as his career took off and he got drawn into a whole exciting life being a rising star in New York City. They’d actually been separated, on the precipice of discussing the “D” word when Alice had happened—just one of those things life throws at you. When Jen had decided to keep the baby, Bucky hadn’t felt much about it either way—he figured at that point Jen knew whatever she was getting into, it would be more or less without his help.

Looking back on his apathy now, Bucky feels deeply ashamed of himself. He’d cared so much about all the wrong things. And he didn’t realize exactly how fucked up his priorities were until a drunk driver t-boned Jen at an intersection and he suddenly found himself the sole parent to a six month old daughter who’d looked up at him with her mom’s green eyes, his chin, and nothing but terrifying, unconditional trust.

All at once he’d found the version of himself who cared about whether he was on the list for the right club opening or wearing the right label painfully supplanted by one whose heart now resided outside of his body and frequently had spit-up on his shirts. But the fear had been exhilarating, too—that Bucky from before had been only half awake, buried under a layer of chic cynicism. Caring for Alice, loving Alice, it had woken him up from that sleep to a life of urgent, present emotion—full of hope and possibility and delight without the protection of irony.

He moved them from the city less than a month later. In Bucky’s mind, it was a place that had already deprived Alice of both her parents in one way or another in the span of her short life. He wasn’t going to let it steal him away again now—not ever.

His grandpa had been in the oil business, once upon a time, and the Barnes family (which was now Bucky, his mom, and his sister) still owned a random assortment of real estate in various locations where the old man had thought land might come in handy.

Bucky had picked the most remote—a decommissioned lighthouse on the Labrador coast—packing up what he needed and selling the rest. He’s always been an all-or-nothing kind of guy and he knew he didn’t want to let himself have any option but to give fatherhood all he has. Dramatic, maybe, but necessary.

He sighs, looking down at the cherubic little face next to him and lays a soft hand on her back. Moments like this, he can feel his heart pressing at the walls of his ribcage, barely contained. No matter what else he fucked up before, she’s _perfect_ , and the fact that the universe still allowed him to be the one to love her, to raise her, to help her get to be who she’s going to be—he’s awestruck by it sometimes.

_Damn_ , he thinks, sighing as he dog-ears the corner of his book. Maybe he needs an early bedtime tonight just as much as the other two—he’s really letting himself get schmaltzy up in here.

He turns off the lights and flops down on his pillow. Alice rolls over almost at once, smacking her arm across his face and ending the swell of sentimentality for the moment.

_Tomorrow_ , Bucky tells himself. He’ll sort it all out tomorrow.

*

Tomorrow, as it always does, brings its own complications.

Bucky wakes up to Alice’s soft cooing and the howling rage of an all-out blizzard shrieking around the tower.

Bucky groans, and Alice graduates to smacking him in the face delightedly, blissfully unaware of things like satellite service interruptions, social anxiety, and the burden of what now promises to be several more days of rehabilitating an amnesiac in his home. There’s no way he’ll be able to get ahold of anyone in Elliston in the midst of this, even if by some miracle his sat phone is still working. They’ll just have to ride it out.

Looks like he won’t be going fishing this week after all.

Bucky dresses Alice in an easy fleece onesie (covered in obnoxiously adorable puppy dogs, because in Bucky’s opinion if you have a baby and don’t dress them in the most ridiculously cute things you can find, what’s even the point?) and throws on a pair of sweatpants and a soft black sweater. No reason for either of them getting all dressed up with nowhere to go. It’s not like Steve exactly counts as having company over.

When they emerge from the tower into the main house, the first thing that Bucky sees is Steve’s makeshift bed tidily folded and stacked on the couch.

Steve himself is in the kitchen, sleeves of Bucky’s sweatshirt pushed up to his elbows as he scrubs the countertop.

“Uh…morning,” Bucky says, bemusedly.

Steve looks up, the expression on his face almost stricken. “I’m so sorry for all of this—for imposing on you, Mr. Barnes.”

Bucky flicks his eyes to the stack of mail on the end of the counter where he assumes Steve figured out his name, and back at Steve, nonplussed. Then he barks with laughter, setting Alice on the ground to toddle off and find some entertainment. He walks over to lean his elbows on the counter across from Steve and his sad puppy expression.

“Whoa. Okay first of all, jesus fuck Steve, call me Bucky, what the hell?” he says, still laughing a little, “and second, sleeping on my couch is not as much of an imposition as turning up dead on my beach, so I’m counting this whole thing as a win alright?”

Steve’s eyebrows are furrowed in worry, but he smiles tentatively. “I just feel bad you—you gotta deal with me. I don’t like putting you out.”

“Well, you should probably get used to the idea pal,” Bucky says with a shrug, gesturing to the whiteout outside the windows. “No idea how long this’ll hold out, but you’re not going anywhere while it does.”

Steve ducks his head. “Yeah I kind of figured that when I woke up.”

“So you decided to clean my house in the hopes that I wouldn’t send you shivering out into the blizzard, huh?”

That elicits a sheepish chuckle and a slight blush spreading over Steve’s cheekbones, and shit if that isn’t charming in the most “aw shucks” way Bucky’s ever seen.

“Something like that.”

“Well I accept,” Bucky says, moving around the counter and Steve to get to the coffee pot. “I will not kick you out unto your certain death today and we’ll see how it goes.”

“Very generous,” Steve says, voice dry. “You must be a real paragon of virtue around town.”

Bucky smiles at the snark. “I have been told I’m nothing short of magnanimous.”

“Guess I got lucky then.”

Bucky turns and finds Steve’s eyes on him, giving him a measuring look that he drops as soon as Bucky catches him at it.

“Coffee’ll be ready in a minute.”

 

Steve insists on cleaning up after breakfast as well, and Bucky in no way tries to argue with him. He seems like a stubborn guy. Plus, while it’s not like he’s been _entirely_ overwhelmed with the effort of cooking and cleaning just for himself and a baby in the past months, he can’t say it isn’t nice only to have to do half the work.

Bucky instead sets himself to cleaning up Alice, who has enthusiastically smeared applesauce across her highchair tray and entire face. He plops her on the kitchen counter and swipes up a clean rag from a stack, reaching past Steve to dunk it under the running faucet.

Steve watches him for a moment as Bucky tries to wipe Alice’s face while she does her best to snatch the towel away from him, cackling.

“Is it…just the two of you?” He asks after a bit, eyes going back to the soapy dishes in the sink.

Bucky hears the unasked question and does his best to answer straightforwardly, tone even.

“Yep, just us. Alice’s mom passed away in a car accident a little less than a year ago. So it’s me and her.”

Steve winces. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry.”

Bucky shrugs. “Not prying, just reasonable curiosity. Not your fault life’s a bitch.”

“So you—you’re the lighthouse keeper then?” he asks.

“God no!” Bucky laughs, a little startled, “This thing hasn’t been a real lighthouse in like…60 years.”

“Oh,” Steve says with a small frown. “What do you do then?”

Finishing with Alice to the best of his abilities for the moment, Bucky bends over to set her free again. She toddles off, steps a little wobbly as she warms up, though they’re getting surer every day. He’d had to baby-proof all the staircases from her increasing solo explorations four months ago and she hasn’t slowed since. He sighs, dropping the rag on the counter.

“I was in tech. Worked for Stark Industries in Manhattan before…before we left. Still consult once in a while. But now I’m mostly just Alice’s dad. Trying to keep it that way as long as I can.”

“Stark…” Steve says, and Bucky glances over curiously at the tone. His face is distant, suddenly. “I think…I think I know that name.”

“Yeah,” Bucky says cautiously, “I mean you probably would. Stark Industries is pretty hard to get away from. Unless…you mean like personally? Maybe you know Tony?”

“Tony Stark,” Steve says, as if testing the feel of it in his mouth. He shakes his head, focus coming back to the fore with a little shake of his head. “I don’t know…thought for a minute…but I’m not sure.”

“Well,” Bucky says, tone light but eyes still fixed intently on Steve’s face, “it’s a start. Don’t worry about it. It’ll probably be like that, something will trigger your memory eventually.” 

“Yeah,” Steve agrees. But he still sounds disappointed.

After breakfast is all put away, Bucky works on getting another fire going in the fireplace, glad he restocked the woodpile back when the weather was cooperating. If they’re going to be stuck inside with a blizzard going for who knows how long, Bucky appreciates being able to at least set the right cozy atmosphere so it feels enjoyable.

Steve hovers, a little awkwardly.

“Better settle in Steve, might be a long one. Never know up here. Grab a book or something,” Bucky tells him, jerking his head toward the built-in shelves lining the wall beside him. “Hope you like murder or science, ’cause that’s about all I got.”

Steve snorts, moving over to the shelves, “As a pastime or just an intellectual pursuit? I’m really hoping for all our sake’s I’m not suppressing memories of my murder spree.”

Bucky laughs, “Maybe you’re on the lam. This is a pretty good place to escape a suspicious string of dead wives or something.”

Maybe he _should_ be worried about that kind of possibility, but he just can’t bring himself to really worry that Steve is harboring a dark side. And his gut is pretty accurate about these things. 

“Huh,” Steve says, thoughtfully, his eyes roving over the titles on the shelf, “pretty sure you’re joshing me, but I don’t think I ever was married.”

“How do you know?” Bucky asks, giving him a curious, sideways glance.

Steve frowns, thinking, but eventually shrugs. “Not sure. Still can’t really…it’s like that blizzard out there. Can’t quite see through it. But I can sorta feel the shape of certain things I guess I know how to do. Bein’ married doesn’t feel familiar.”

He turns, a tattered copy of _Death on the Nile_ in his hand, reading the back cover with a considering frown. Maybe he’s wondering if he’s read it before.

Alice approaches him, chattering in excitement. Bucky turns from the flickering start of the flames to see her reaching up at Steve, chubby little arms demanding. Soon she flaps them too hard, overbalancing herself and falling to her butt with a sad little squeak. Steve makes an instinctive motion toward her, but pulls back at once, clasping his large hands to his chest around the novel and looking guiltily over at Bucky.

“Sorry,” he says, still holding his hands tight in front of himself.

Bucky suppresses a smile, making a decision on the sweetness of that gesture alone. Steve’s hands look like they’re straining with the effort of not reaching down for the baby in front of him and Bucky knows that feeling.

“It’s okay. You can pick her up, if you want.”

Steve’s eyes widen in surprise, a pleased smile curving his mouth, “You sure?”

Bucky waves a flippant hand, as if Alice has all kinds of people holding her on the regular, rather than exactly the opposite. “Course. Pretty sure she demands it, in fact.”

“Can’t turn down a direct order like that, then.” Steve says, reaching down tentatively to lift Alice to his chest, so that she’s sitting on the crook of his arm staring up into his face.

She lets out a giggle, immediately reaching out to tug on Steve’s nose and then pat his cheek. He holds out a finger for her to grab onto, his eyes moving down to inspect her chubby hand when it wraps around it. Alice makes a gleeful noise and flings her arms out wide, throwing herself forward to hug around Steve’s neck, and Bucky can see the expression on Steve’s face that’s a mixture of surprise and awe that he knows he’s worn plenty of times himself. It does something funny in his stomach, a twisting sensation that makes him look away, back to the task of fire building before he can think too much about it.

By the time he turns away from the now crackling blaze, Steve is sitting on the couch with Alice still held gently against his shoulder—looking for all intents and purposes like she’s just put herself down for her mid-morning nap ahead of schedule. Steve is running one of his hands down her back and leaning his bright golden head against her soft brown curls.

“I can take her to her crib, if you want,” Bucky says in a low voice, reaching for her.

Steve hesitates, then looks up at him hopefully, “Do you mind if she…if she sleeps like this for a little?” He gives a self-conscious huff of laughter. “I think I uh—like babies.”

Bucky’s stomach does the twisty thing again, but he laughs, too, eyeing the tender but practiced way Steve is holding her. Alice doesn’t exactly take to strangers well, times like their bi-monthly grocery trips and various sporadic outings. She’s choosey and used to Bucky. Seeing her snuggled up to Steve like she’s known him forever is…new. But Bucky trusts her judgment more than most grown people’s, even if he’s feeling a little twinge of jealousy.

“Sure looks like it. But yeah, knock yourself out.”

Alice takes a full two hour nap for the first time in two weeks, Steve holding her for the duration.

Bucky feels oddly at loose ends watching Alice snuggle into Steve’s neck, little fists tucked under his chin. So he offers to start reading the Agatha Christie aloud and Steve accepts, eyes drifting shut as Bucky falls into the steady rhythm of reading away the rest of the morning.

 

The snowstorm shows no signs of abating the next day, or the one after that. And Steve’s memory is similarly unyielding. Eventually Bucky stops asking if he remembers anything, seeing the frustration on the other man’s face when the answer continues to be no. 

Bucky digs up an air mattress from the storage on the ground level of the tower and sets Steve up in his library/den/office on the second level. He also manages to find a pair of flannel-lined jeans that he’d bought a size too big thinking he’d layer them, which more or less fit Steve. More in that they are technically the right length and Steve can sit down in them, less in that they hug to the man’s muscular thighs in a way that no item of L.L. Bean is generally designed to fit. They should look like dad jeans. They decidedly don’t. Bucky chooses aggressively to ignore it the best he can.

Steve offers to take over reading aloud where Bucky had left off the day before and Bucky is delighted to find that Steve throws himself into the performance—he does voices for all the characters and can’t seem to help himself from gesturing with his free hand as he reads. Alice (who can’t understand what he’s saying, thankfully, since it’s about murder) is enthralled by his enthusiasm and spends much of the time standing on the couch next to where he sits, bouncing up and down and grasping at Steve’s hand.

“An actor?” Bucky asks him, when he pauses at the end of the chapter.

“I don’t think so, Buck,” Steve says after a moment of consideration, dog earing the corner of the page. 

The third afternoon Bucky comes back up from the cellar, restocking the kitchen pantry from the larger storage downstairs, to find Steve at the little dining table with Alice on his lap, both of them bent over a scattered array of crayons.

Bucky sets his armload of things (a bag of potatoes, two loaves of bread, one frozen gallon of milk to thaw, one frozen lasagna) on the counter, then moves to look over Steve’s shoulder at what they’re working on.

“Oh shit,” Bucky says automatically when he sees Steve’s page, “you’re like…actually good.”

“Should you swear that much in front of your kid?” Steve asks, absently, as he colors in the green of Alice’s eyes on his drawing of her.

Bucky cuffs him on the shoulder, good-naturedly. “The book says I got about two months before the language acquisition really ramps up, so fuck you, I gotta get my kicks while I still can.”

Steve chuckles. Bucky returns to his previous comment. “For real though Steve, that’s good. Maybe you’re an artist, huh?”

Steve gives a derisive snort of laughter, “Yeah, right.”

“Why not?” Bucky asks, genuinely intrigued by Steve’s reaction to the suggestion.

He looks up at Bucky with a frown, thinking, then his face clears and he shakes his head. “I don’t really know why not. Just feels silly for some reason.”

Bucky doesn’t push it. But he does hang the little crayon drawing of Alice—along with her own Pollock-esque scribbled masterpiece of course—on the refrigerator.

The fourth morning, after breakfast, Steve, looking quite abashed, asks Bucky if he by any chance has a spare razor he could use.

“Only I feel like kind of a heel all scruffy like this,” he says, running a hand over what is honestly a fairly impressive beard given it’s only been three days since he was clean shaven. Bucky raises his eyebrows and Steve nearly falls over himself to add, “Not—not that I think you look like a heel or anything! I like your beard, it suits, it’s just me, I don’t normally…oh jeez.” He trails off with an anguished look and Bucky laughs, taking pity on him.

“Easy killer,” he says, patting Steve’s slumped shoulder. “Sorry, should’ve offered. Didn’t think about it…being an unkempt heel myself and whatnot.”

Steve groans, and puts his hand over his face while Bucky laughs at him. In four days, even without knowing the details of his houseguest’s identity or history, there are a few things that Bucky already knows about Steve. One is that he is very polite, except in unguarded moments when he’s slipped into a natural bantering sarcasm. Another is that when he’s trying to be the former, Bucky receives great pleasure from teasing him long enough that he lapses into the latter. He fetches him a razor and some shaving cream from his bathroom cabinet.

Bucky spends the next little while blowing bubbles on the floor and watching Alice chase them, shrieking. He can tell that she’s starting to get a little stir crazy cooped up in here and he can’t exactly blame her. At least when you’re a grown up you can be miserable but understand eventually things will change again. Hopefully it won’t be too long before they can get a little fresh air. Until then he’ll do what he did all winter—get creative and try to keep her busy.

At some point, Alice starts to lose steam chasing the bubbles around, falling to her bottom and yelling more angrily than happily when she pops them. He caps the bubbles and scoops her up for naptime, realizing with a frown that Steve hasn’t made a reappearance. Bucky shrugs to himself, carrying Alice up to her crib. It’s funny how quickly he’s gotten used to the presence of another person, that he notices the absence of it already after only a short time.

When he comes back downstairs though, Steve still hasn’t returned to the living room and Bucky grows a little more concerned.

He hesitates in front of the bathroom door before knocking—Steve’s a grown man, he can lock himself away in the bathroom if he needs a break, it’s none of Bucky’s business. But he knocks anyway.

“Steve? You okay?”

“Um…yeah,” Steve’s voice comes from the other side of the door, sounding distinctly not okay.

Bucky bites his lip. “Can I—can I come in?”

There’s a long pause. Then Steve says, “Yeah, alright.”

He swings the door open. Steve is sitting on the edge of the bathtub, razor held loosely in his hand between his knees. His head is hanging down and when he looks up Bucky can see that he didn’t make very good progress with his shaving, in fact he’s bleeding lightly from two or three nicks down his cheek. His eyes are suspiciously red—if he wasn’t crying in here before, he was trying hard not to.

“Sorry I—” Steve stops and rubs angrily at his eyes. “I don’t know what happened. I know I know how I just—can’t seem to get it right for some reason…” He tries for a self-deprecating laugh, but it comes out a little wet, and he looks away, not meeting Bucky’s gaze.

“Oh, Steve,” Bucky sighs, stepping forward. “It’s not—you’re still getting back on your feet. Nothing wrong with that.”

“I guess,” Steve says, not sounding convinced, still not looking up.

Bucky wavers for a moment, but he can’t just leave that look on Steve’s face. It’s the same feeling he gets when Alice takes a spill and looks for him, helpless but knowing he’ll make it better.

“Can I?” he asks, holding out his hand.

Steve does look up at that, lips pressed into a tight, unhappy line. “Okay,” he says, handing over the razor.

“C’mere,” Bucky gestures him over to stand in front of the sink, taking up the shaving cream and lathering a good amount between his hands.

He holds them up, not wanting to push Steve, who’s clearly having a bit of a fragile moment. But Steve closes his eyes, leaning his face forward slightly to allow it. Bucky spreads the cream over Steve’s cheeks, jaw, and down his neck, using a liberal amount since his skin has obviously already taken a beating from his earlier attempts.

Steve swallows and Bucky can feel his throat working under his fingers, can see Steve’s eyelashes moving slightly against his cheek. They’re outrageously long—he wonders how he didn’t notice before. But then, they haven’t been this close to each other since that first day and Bucky had been preoccupied with the possibility of Steve dying at the time.

He tucks one hand under Steve’s chin to tilt his face, Steve obliging without opening his eyes. Bucky starts with his right cheek, the one he hadn’t already nicked up, taking a few long gentle swipes. The only sounds in the bathroom are both of their soft breathing, the scrape of the razor, and the small plop the water makes when Bucky dips it in to rinse it between strokes.

He switches to the other side, being extra careful over the places where the small cuts were. But when he’s cleared Steve’s left cheek and begins moving down his jawline, he realizes he can’t actually see where they were anymore. They must have been miniscule.

Bucky ducks and moves his fingers to Steve’s jaw, tipping it up further to reach the underside of his chin and neck, and Steve reaches out a hand as if to steady himself against the countertop. Bucky finds to his horror that his own hand is inexplicably trembling and he grips the handle of the razor more firmly to hide the small movement—from himself or Steve, he isn’t really certain.

At last he plunks the razor down in the sink, reaching for a towel to wipe away the last of the shaving cream from Steve’s cheeks and neck. He runs his fingertips lightly down Steve’s jaw—checking for missed spots, he tells himself as they linger apparently of their own will. When he pulls his gaze away from his handiwork (and _not_ Steve’s mouth, definitely not) he finds Steve’s blue eyes on him, expression veiled.

Bucky takes a quick step back out of his space, dropping the towel to the counter, fumbling a little with the faucet as he rinses his hands.

“There you go, good as new,” he says, brightly. “Just gotta be patient with yourself. It’ll come back.”

He gives Steve a tight smile, then turns to go, suddenly feeling like there isn’t enough air in the small bathroom for both of them. But Steve stops him, long fingers wrapping around Bucky’s wrist.

“Thanks,” Steve says, voice low. “I mean it.”

Bucky clears his throat. “Of course.”

Steve squeezes once, then releases him.

 

Bucky doesn’t flee, but he does remove himself with alacrity to his tower bedroom, where he spends several minutes trying to convince himself that he doesn’t feel anything about that at all.

But he’s not an idiot. He gets what’s happening. Bucky just hasn’t really _wanted_ somebody in that way in a long time, since before Alice really, and it’s caught him by surprise. But he’s an adult and now that he’s realized that of _course_ he’s going to have some feelings over a painfully handsome man in tight jeans who looks good holding Bucky’s kid who also happens to be snowed in with him, he can deal with it.

Bucky closes his eyes and lets himself—just _once_ —replay the scene in the bathroom, but with an alternate ending with Steve’s tongue in Bucky’s mouth and his hands in Bucky’s hair and his hips pinning him to the sink.

Then he shakes his head. Okay. Yeah. There is a lot about that that would be nice. Because fuck it, Bucky _is_ lonely and probably touch starved and Steve is hot and gentle and has been cleaning his house for the past four days.

But Steve probably has somebody waiting for him. A wife, a girlfriend. Hell, even a boyfriend—although an addition to the “bad idea” list is the fact that Steve has not indicated any interest or inclination in that direction up until now in the first place. _Though, it’s not exactly like you’ve made that option available yourself, all he knows is that you had a baby with a woman so—no, stop it! Irrelevant._

He’s got a crush. It’s not a viable option. It’s not the end of the world.

If anything, maybe the universe sent Steve as a gentle…reminder of sorts. That eventually, there will be other people in his and Alice’s little world again, and that it’s not a bad thing. That he should enjoy this feeling so that one day he’s less freaked out when it’s time to embrace the real thing.

Of course, it’s hard to imagine anyone else as impossibly good as Steve stumbling across their path…

As ever, it’s Alice that brings him back to practicalities, her cries over the monitor signaling the end of her nap.

Bucky squares himself up and heads back down the stairs.

Alice is feeling apparently well-refreshed from her bubble escapades and bounces brightly against the bars of the crib when he goes to get her.

She launches into a very lively mostly one-sided conversation as they come down the stairs, Bucky grinning at her and occasionally saying things like “Is that so?” _Man_ , he thinks, _once this girl can compose sentences with more than “da” and “ca” she is going to get on a roll and never stop._

It’s funny—Bucky was never a baby guy, really, before she came along. People would always say things like “Oh, little Johnny has so much personality” or whatever, but he’d pretty much felt like if you’d seen one you’d seen them all and parents just liked to read their own personality quirks onto them. Then Alice was born and it became clear very quickly that he could change the moon and stars before he could change her. She was born curious and enthusiastic and stubborn as hell.

Bucky looks around at the bottom of the stairs and notices that Steve still isn’t in any of his handful of usual places in the living room and sighs. He hopes he didn’t make it super obviously weird before.

Before he can work himself into too much worry over it, Steve, looking a little embarrassed, appears at the mouth of the hallway, head ducked. He hangs back a little, looking more nervous than he has in days.

“I’ll make lunch soon, if you’re hungry,” Bucky says, looking at Alice rather than Steve, to take off the pressure of direct eye contact.

“Thanks,” Steve says, stepping forward.

Bucky notices again that his eyes are a bit puffy and his expression forlorn.

“Can I?” Steve asks, holding out his hands toward them and Bucky places Alice into them without even thinking about it. Alice coos and stretches her chubby arms to meet him.

Steve buries his nose against her shoulder for a moment and she giggles and bounces in his arms, flapping her hands. He pulls back and smiles down at her sadly. Bucky’s throat tightens a little at the expression—but okay, he knows what his dumb heart is doing now and he doesn’t have to let it run off with him.

“I still can hardly remember anything,” Steve says, softly, still looking at Alice. “I keep thinking I’m getting a flash and then it’s just…gone. And suddenly these things that I _know_ I know just…don’t work.”

He sounds very small and Bucky’s heart crumples for him. Everything else he feels about Steve and about his own shit bleeds into the background. However unexpected and complicated this is for him, it’s nothing compared to how hard it must be for Steve. Everything is uncertain, the answer to all his questions locked infuriatingly away in his own mind. With no sign of his memory returning, he has to be asking himself where on earth he’s going to start, where he’ll go when this snow clears. It must be terrifying.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” he adds, even softer, giving voice to just what Bucky had been thinking.

Bucky steps forward, squeezing Steve’s shoulder with one hand and putting the other on Alice’s back. She giggles and leans over backwards as far as she can to grin at him, clapping her hands.

“Look, Steve…” Bucky starts, not exactly sure what he’s going to say, but compelled to take away the worry that has settled between Steve’s eyebrows, “you don’t have to…I don’t have to kick you out the second this storm ends. If you…if you want to stay. While you wait to remember.”

Steve’s eyes flick up to Bucky’s, wide and surprised, but Bucky thinks he looks hopeful, too.

“I mean, you have to wait it out somewhere, right? ’Til you can figure out where home is?” he rushes to add, shrugging casually. “We can put out word through the Mounties in Elliston when the phone’s back up, but…you might as well stay while they figure it out. If you want. Better than the motel in town.”

Bucky looks away again, grateful for the buffer of baby between them. He wonders if Steve can see right through him—so lonely and desperate for a friend that he’s willing to draw out their time together as long as he can, suddenly not ready to let go of having someone there. Of having Steve there.

But Steve surprises him, reaching up to clutch his fingers where they’re resting on Steve’s shoulder, gripping them tightly.

“I can’t do that to you Buck—you’ve already done so much for me. You don’t gotta offer just ’cause you happened to be the one who had to haul my sorry ass off the beach. I can get by on my own.”

“Yeah, but…you don’t have to.” Bucky says, gently, “That’s not—I’m not saying it because I think I owe you anything, Steve. I’m saying it because I want to. I—we like having you here. I’m okay if it’s a little longer. Honest.”

The line between Steve’s eyebrows finally eases, and he gives a small smile. He leans forward and Bucky’s heart twitches for a split second before he realizes that Steve is leaning to drop a small kiss on Alice’s forehead.

“I…if you’re sure,” he says, pressing Bucky’s hand one more time before releasing it.

Bucky steps back, a small smile on his face. He’s not sure about a lot, but he _is_ sure about this. Just for a little longer.

“I’ll make lunch.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from Florence & the Machine's Never Let Me Go.
> 
> _And it's peaceful in the deep  
>  'Cause either way you cannot breathe  
> No need to pray, no need to speak  
> Now I am under_


	2. We're Men of Snow, We Melt One Day

_There’s fire all around him, sound and fury and shouting that barely makes its way in past the deafening pounding of his heart in his ears. A massive beam crashes to the floor near him and someone screams, but he can’t stop—there’s something he’s supposed to be doing, somewhere he has to reach before it’s too late, his legs pumping under him as he sprints through the chaos. But the space is endless and he can’t see anything ahead besides more burning and vague bodies running past. He has to get there in time, something terrible will happen if he doesn’t, he has to—there’s another explosion to his right and he’s thrown from his feet by the blast, flung backward into the half collapsed wall crawling with flame. But instead of the burning pain he expects his flesh is met with searing cold. Everything around him suddenly goes white, swallowing him, and the sound of his heartbeat in his ears is dimming, suffocated by the cold. Someone is saying his name, and he opens his mouth to answer, only to find his throat frozen too, and nothing comes out…_

“Steve?” comes the voice again, as Steve gasps himself awake.

For a moment he thrashes, fighting the blanket of white enveloping him, before he realizes it’s just the down comforter he was wrapped in to sleep and that he’s not sinking but just engulfed in a slightly deflated air mattress. He blinks, getting his bearings, slowly remembering that he’s surrounded by the round walls of the lighthouse and shelves of Bucky’s things.

“Are you okay?” Bucky asks, hovering in the doorway of Steve’s makeshift bedroom.

“Yeah,” Steve assures him, sitting up, though he isn’t exactly sure if it’s true. “Yeah, just a nightmare. Did I wake you up?”

Bucky shakes his head, still hanging outside the door, arms folded across his chest and chin tucked into the thick soft collar of his turtleneck sweater. His eyes are wide and worried looking. Steve scrubs his hands over his face.

“I was on my way down—just noticed when I went past that you were…sorry.”

Steve nods. The tower rooms aren’t rooms exactly as much as just levels, so there isn’t a door at the entrance. The curve of the staircase wrapping past it means that it generally has privacy even without a door, but it is open to the two or three steps just outside of it. Steve assumes it’s the same upstairs on the next level too, where Bucky sleeps, but he hasn’t had any reason to be up there to see.

“Don’t be,” Steve tells him and he’s embarrassed to find his voice still a little shaky.

“Do you…can I do anything?”

Steve looks up at him, standing in his socked feet and sweatpants and oversized sweater and he has a sudden urge to go to him and bury his face in his shoulder, let Bucky wrap his arms around Steve until his softness wears away the rough edges of the nightmare. He thinks maybe if he did, the memory of agonizing cold would be no match for it. 

“…Steve?” Bucky asks, hesitantly, a slight frown creasing his forehead.

Steve shakes himself, dismissing the thought. “No. No I’ll be okay, thanks.”

Bucky peers at him for another quiet moment and Steve draws his knees up self-consciously. He wonders if Bucky can tell that he can’t look away from that silver-blue gaze when it’s on him, even if he tries. But Bucky’s expression is hard to read—or maybe just hard for Steve to read, as he reminds himself that he’s only had a week to study the mercurial modes of the other man’s face. It’s not enough time to feel like he should know what Bucky wants when he looks at him, regardless of the fact that Steve quite literally knows Bucky better than he knows himself at this point.

Steve looks away, embarrassed to have used the word “want” even in thinking about what might be behind Bucky’s steady gaze. Want is so far from anything he should be letting himself consider it doesn’t even bear naming.

A distant part of his mind that has taken to tracking these things notes that this is one of those familiar feelings. Steve thinks whoever he is, there have been a lot of things in his life he hasn’t allowed himself to want, much less harbor real hope of having. So the soaring sensation he refuses to name when Bucky smiles at him takes residence in his chest alongside all of the other nameless unremembered things that live in that space he can’t look too closely at, where at least his muscle memory knows how to deal with it. Which is to say that he doesn’t.

Better to focus on giving himself something practical to hope for, something he can actually be optimistic of attaining. Like hoping that maybe he can make Bucky think of him as a friend rather than a burden, some stray foundling he’s now saddled with indefinitely. Maybe even someone he’s glad of having known, when this is all over. Maybe.

His eyes are drawn back to Bucky’s face, unable to look away for long and Bucky’s expression is curious, but smoothes quickly back into something else.

“Listen come downstairs with me, huh? I’ll make coffee. You can even go get Alice up if you want—be her hero for the day for freeing her,” Bucky says with a small smile.

Steve’s helpless to resist an offer like that. “Okay, twist my arm why don’t you?”

Bucky breaks into a real grin and lets his arms uncross from in front of his chest, making Steve realize that the stance was a nervous one. Nervous waking Steve up, he wonders? Or that Steve would be upset with him checking in? The last thing Steve wants is for his presence in Bucky’s home to bring him any more stress than it otherwise must already, so he gets up with a pleasant smile and moves to follow Bucky down the stairs, resolving to be extra helpful today to compensate.

But Bucky seems to read some of that intention, if not everything—gosh, he hopes not everything—and turns to Steve as they hit the bottom of the stairs, slinging an arm around his shoulders comfortably.

“It’s okay, you know. Everybody gets nightmares. And maybe you have a really good reason for it. You don’t have to feel bad on my account.”

Steve hunches his shoulders a little bit under Bucky’s touch, surprised at being so easily seen through.

“I’m just trying not to be more of a pain in the ass than necessary.”

Bucky squeezes his shoulder once more as they reach the kitchen, then lets go, moving toward the coffee maker.

“Storm’s past. Called the Mounties’ station in Elliston this morning, let ’em know you’re here and a description and all that,” he says, back still to Steve. Then he turns and looks him deliberately in the eye, “So you’re here ’til we hear something or you remember where you’re supposed to be. And I feel like neither one of us should worry about it until then.”

Steve lets out a breath he didn’t realize he was holding. “Okay,” he says, unsure of what else he _can_ say to that.

Bucky returns to his coffee preparations. “I think there’s probably a very impatient toddler waiting for someone to release her from baby-prison upstairs, so you’d better hop to it if you still want that hero status and not just an angry little ball of resentment.”

Actually, Steve finds a fairly contemplative and pliant Alice when he goes to collect her. She is sitting in her crib with two fingers in her mouth and simply turns luminous eyes at him, holding her arms up trustingly to be lifted.

When Steve scoops her up she burrows her face into his shoulder shyly, grabbing a fistful of the soft green material. It’s the first time Steve has worn this one, so it still smells like Bucky—a surprisingly woodsy scent full of cedar. Steve tucks his nose up against Alice’s curls, breathing in the combination of the two of them—a comforting mixture he thinks alarmingly smells like home to him. Whatever that means.

He lets himself stand like that, gently swaying back and forth in the middle of Alice’s room until she truly begins to perk up, beginning a one-sided kind of conversation that’s mostly “ba ba ba-ba ba,” with the occasional “ca” thrown in and he figures it’s about time for both of them to eat breakfast.

Bucky trades Steve a mug of coffee for Alice, face lighting up when she stretches toward him with waving arms. Steve’s a little sorry to let her go, but watching Bucky bounce her easily onto his hip almost without having to break from his breakfast preparations is nearly worth it.

Steve leans his elbows on the counter and observes the two of them over the rim of his coffee mug. They move together so easily, Bucky managing everything one handed as if it’s nothing and able to give most of his attention to Alice even as he efficiently finishes scrambling eggs. It’s a comfortable, complete scene with Steve looking in as if through a window and he feels undeservedly honored that he _isn’t_ outside looking in. That Bucky was willing to invite him into it. It’s a gift he still isn’t even sure he should accept, but he knows he couldn’t walk away from it either, as long as they’ll have him. They’re a bright, shining sun at the center of their own small galaxy. Steve finds falling into orbit around them easier than breathing.

Maybe it’s the lingering impression of his nightmare, but he feels like whatever it is that’s waiting for him out there, it can’t be better than this.

“You seem kinda quiet today,” Bucky says, breaking Steve from his reverie, eyes still on the pan of eggs. He pauses. “What was your dream about?”

Steve hums into his coffee, trying to remember it, but it’s hard to recapture anything when the warmth of the kitchen, the coffee cup in his hands, Alice’s quiet babbling, the smell of cooking, all of it is so much more sharply real. And more pleasant.

“I don’t remember exactly,” he says, slowly. “I was…running somewhere. I was scared. And then it was just…cold.”

“Do you think…it was real?” Bucky asks, voice careful.

Steve shakes his head, wondering the same thing. “Not sure. I kind of hope not.”

Bucky nods. “Well, dreams. You never know I guess.” He starts dishing food onto three plates, two large and one small plastic one for Alice.

Then he adds, almost too quiet for Steve to hear, “But I hope so, too.”

 

After breakfast, Steve cleans up and Alice refuses to take her nap.

Steve makes no effort to hide his laughter as Bucky holds her in the living room, cajoling unsuccessfully as Alice shrieks with glee, bending her stubby little arms away from him wildly.

“Please, honey baby, I’m begging you, be tired—”

Alice yells something incomprehensible with the clear gist of “No!” She twists in his grasp, almost throwing herself from his arms to the ground and he groans in exasperation.

“Okay, new plan. Steve, what’s the thermometer in the window say?”

Steve leans over the sink of soapy dishes in front of him, squinting at the small instrument in the kitchen window. “Looks like…just about 20 degrees.”

Bucky nods decisively. “Good enough if we keep it short. What do you say to a little fresh air, tire this monster out?”

Steve eyes the window again, a little dubious. It’s true that the storm has fully passed and there’s a brittle blue sky gleaming above the blanket of fresh snow.

“I don’t really have snow things,” he says.

Bucky shrugs, unworried. “I’ll dig something up. Got a spare coat,” he says, “just have to find some kind of pants that can handle that ass.”

Steve chokes on nothing. “I—what?”

Bucky looks just as taken aback as Steve feels and says back blankly, “What.”

“What about my ass?”

Bucky opens and closes his mouth a couple of times, “I—” he shuts it again, spinning on his heel and leaving the room.

Steve’s sure Bucky can hear his snorts of laughter following him all the way up the stairs.

Steve finishes the dishes, thinking about how he can further embarrass Bucky about the comment. Strangely enough, he finds that getting ribbed about his body falls squarely into the “familiar experience” category. The instinct to tease back is strong. 

Sadly, all of his zingers go straight out the window when Bucky returns with Alice, all kitted out for an outdoor adventure and Steve loses track of absolutely everything else because she looks like a precious rainbow colored marshmallow. He laughs in delight at the sight of her and holds out his arms at once, where Bucky obligingly deposits her round, squishy form.

“I’ll grab our stuff,” Bucky says, “then we’ll get outside before she melts in there like the Wicked Witch of the West.”

“I’m meeeeelting, I’m meeeelting!” Steve keens as he bounces Alice up and down, “what a world, what a world!”

Bucky pauses at the door to the hallway, turning in the frame and giving Steve an odd look.

“What?” Steve asks.

“So I uh…guess you remember _The Wizard of Oz_ then?”

Steve feels his eyebrows jump up to his hairline as he realizes Bucky’s right. “Huh. I guess I do.”

“Well, glad you have a sense of priorities Steve. Important details first.” Bucky says with a small smirk, eyes crinkling.

Steve picks up a throw pillow on the couch and hurls it toward him and Bucky ducks, laughing.

“She’s meeeeelting Buck, meeeeelting!” Steve whines, gesturing with the lumpy ball of snow clothes that is Alice at him for effect.

“I’m going, I’m going!”

Steve turns Alice back toward him and she grins up at him with her funny little rabbit teeth, scrunching her nose. He copies her, scrunching his own nose at her until she bubbles with laughter and he swoops in to kiss both of her fat, pink cheeks.

She actually is getting a bit flushed in all her warm gear inside the house, so when Bucky returns with two sets of waterproof snowsuits, Steve simply clambers into his without comment. Alice, who he’s set on the floor while he tugs them on, flops over to her back, arms and legs windmilling above her but unable to turn over, like a turtle.

He and Bucky look at each other over her funny, sad figure, then burst into laughter.

“This is mean, we shouldn’t laugh,” Bucky says through giggles.

“Definitely,” Steve agrees, making no effort to stop.

Alice seems to catch on that she’s being mocked though and her little face crumples and grows red with a brewing howl, so Bucky snatches her up before she can work up too much of a tantrum.

“Think I’ll skip the carrier, since we won’t be out too long,” Bucky says, joggling her a little as they head for the door.

A shock of bracing, frozen air hits them the moment Bucky unlatches the front door, filling Steve’s lungs and making him feel instantly more awake. He jams the hat he was holding in his hands onto his head at once, already feeling the air nip at the tips of his ears.

They have to fight their way through snow that hits them about mid-hip where it’s banked up at the side of the house, Bucky grumbling under his breath about having to come out here to clear it eventually when he (foolishly) hoped he’d finished having to dig out for the year. But once they’re clear of the drifts piled against the wall, they find themselves in the flat open land around the other, non-ocean side of the house in much more manageable knee-deep snow.

There’s something indescribably satisfying about stomping across the completely untouched blanket of white and Steve finds himself marching in circles, just enjoying the crunch of it. Bucky meanwhile wades to a clear spot and flops straight down onto his butt so that he’s sitting in a drift with Alice in his lap. She reaches out and pats at the surface beside her with a mittened hand, chirping inquisitively.

Steve ploughs his way over to them and plucks Alice up from Bucky’s lap, spinning away with her, making her laugh maniacally. He tosses her into the air and she shrieks with happiness, framed by the endless, empty blue sky above them. He catches her in his hands, letting them drop with her almost so that her little boots touch the snow, then bouncing her back up again until she soars out of them, and he knows his face is a mirror of her own wild grin as he laughs, too.

He repeats the process until Alice’s screams of joy start to grow a little woozy sounding, and he tucks her up against his shoulder and trudges back toward Bucky, still half-lying in the snow watching them with a lazy smile.

Steve pivots on the spot next to him, falling backward with a flat thump into the snow, Alice safely cushioned against his chest, and grins over at Bucky.

“I couldn’t tell who was having more fun over there,” Bucky says, eyes squinted against the glare of the sun. Steve can’t help but notice that they’re the exact color of the sky above them, pale and faultless, his cheeks flushed ruddy underneath.

“I think we were splitting it pretty equally,” he replies easily. He lifts his right hand to his mouth, tugging the fingers of his glove off with his teeth so he can scoop up a handful of bright snow, peering at it. Alice reaches out a hand to grab for it and he lets her scatter it from his palm.

“Guess we should head back in,” Bucky says reluctantly, eyes on Alice’s face. “Not supposed to have her out too long when it’s below freezing.”

“Yeah,” Steve says, rubbing his nose against her red, frozen cheek. “She’s getting pretty chilly I think.”

He lurches to his feet with the use of his still gloved hand, Alice propped in the other arm. Then he extends it to Bucky, who accepts, and hauls him up out of his snow bank.

“I’ll take her,” Bucky says with a grin, picking Alice from Steve’s arms, “but you go ahead of us, you leave nice big footprints to walk in, like a yeti.”

Steve turns toward the house, making a big show of tromping down the snow as he walks with exaggerated, clomping footprints. He’s growling theatrically and turns to see Bucky and Alice’s reaction to his performance. But as he does, he finds that he doesn’t place his left foot carefully enough. He loses his footing, his feet flying out from under him.

He stares up at the sky for a moment from his back, nonplussed. Then Bucky’s bemused face appears above him.

“Aren’t yeti supposed to be a little more sure footed than that?” he asks.

“Ow.” Steve says. Then he laughs, a puff of white air that billows in front of him, and climbs to his feet.

“Ah!” Bucky says with alarm. Steve looks down and realizes what he sees, which is that the snow beside where he’s fallen is speckled with bright red dots of blood.

“Oh,” Steve replies, holding up his bare hand, which he’s managed to slice down the center of his palm either on ice or a rock as he fell. “Huh. It’s so cold, I can’t even feel it.” The long cut continues to drip crimson onto the stark white ground.

Bucky rolls his eyes affectionately, stepping around Steve toward the door. “Guess this is why I have a first aid kit. Gotta be prepared for antics to go south. Come on,” he says, jerking his head toward the house.

“Try not to bleed on my floor while I get Alice set,” Bucky says as he kicks the door to the mudroom shut behind them.

“I think it’s stopped actually,” Steve says, frowning at his palm.

They shake the snow from their boots and coats, stripping out of their wet outer gear and hanging it on the rail of hooks along the wall to drip freely before going into the house.

“Okay,” Bucky sighs, putting Alice on the ground to toddle off for the moment. He rummages in a kitchen drawer, pulling out a small white first aid kit and beckoning Steve over. “Let’s see it.”

Steve stretches his palm over the counter, and Bucky peers at it, eyebrows creased.

“Huh,” he says.

“What?”

Bucky rips open an alcohol swab, wiping away the smear of blood that has dried around the cut. Only—there isn’t much of a cut at all. Steve joins Bucky in staring down at the hand, perplexed.

“But it was bleeding. A lot.” Steve says, confused.

Bucky takes a deep breath. “Maybe…maybe the cold just made the small scratch bleed more than it normally would? Or uh…made it close up faster or something.”

Steve stretches the skin of his palm a little, nodding. He can still see where the full length of the slice was though, is the thing. It’s just mostly all pink and shiny, like it’s been healing for several days, just a small section of it still unclosed.

He looks up and finds Bucky’s eyes on him, face concerned. Then Bucky shrugs very deliberately and closes the first aid kit with a snap.

“Nothing to be but glad about that, right? Better than it seems is…better.”

Steve swallows hard. He nods in agreement, but finds that it doesn’t dispel the bubble of doubt rising up in the pit of his stomach. Something odd and not quite right has happened and even if it means his injury isn’t hurting, it still scares him.

Bucky must see the fear on his face, because he reaches out and squeezes Steve’s hand firmly in his own, a quick, reassuring gesture.

“Listen, why don’t we finish our book? You can go see what Alice is getting into and I’ll get a fire going. We could all use it after the cold, huh?”

Steve gives a small smile, knowing exactly what Bucky is trying to do. Trying to distract him from his worry and the uncertain enormity of questions swirling around him, none of which he can answer. Fortunately, the distraction works and Steve turns instinctively to locate Alice’s curly brown head across the room.

She’s playing with her collection of bright, plastic zoo animals in the corner dedicated to her bins of toys. Or rather, she’s picking up and throwing her collection of bright plastic zoo animals with an almost cross-eyed look on her face. Steve chuckles to himself and picks her up, finding that she doesn’t protest, her missed nap from earlier making itself apparent now post-excitement.

Bucky turns from the beginnings of a crackling stack of logs in the fireplace, brushing off his hands. He picks up the book from the coffee table, holding it out to Steve, eyebrows raised in a question.

“Would you—do you mind reading for a bit?” Steve asks, slumping onto the sofa, and kicking his legs up as he scoots into place.

Bucky smiles softly, folding himself into his armchair. “Okay, but you have to do without the voices. I’m not on your level.”

“You’ll do.”

Steve smiles and lifts Alice up to rearrange her on his chest, where she tucks against him bonelessly, sticking her two fingers into her mouth, already more than halfway to sleeping.

He lets his eyes drift closed as Bucky starts reading, savoring the soothing flow of his voice and the even rhythm of Alice’s breathing as she grows heavier and heavier in sleep. He feels incredibly warm, through to the deep parts of his soul in a way that can’t be explained by the fire alone.

He’s not asleep quite entirely, just drifting on the waves of contentment, lulled by Bucky’s voice. So he’s aware of it a few minutes later when Bucky pauses in his reading and gives a small huff of laughter. Steve doesn’t open his eyes, too comfortable to move, but he hears Bucky turn the corner of the page and set the book gently on the table, unfolding himself from his chair.

Bucky’s steps pause as he goes to move past them and he bends over them quietly. Steve can feel the warmth of Bucky’s skin radiating from him. He drops a silent kiss on Alice’s forehead, where it rests against Steve’s shoulder.

And then, feather light, Steve feels the ghost of a kiss brush across his own temple.

It’s quick, almost thoughtless, like it’s the most natural thing in the world for Bucky to double an affectionate gesture between the two of them. But Steve’s heart skitters, belying the easiness of the motion.

He cracks his eyes as Bucky steps away. He only gets about two paces past the couch before he halts in his tracks, a little intake of breath escaping him as he turns back to look at them, as if just realizing what he’d done. Steve closes his eyes before Bucky can see that he’s awake and Bucky lets out a long breath.

He’s clearly relieved thinking that Steve remains unaware of the gesture. Maybe he didn’t mean it, Steve thinks, happy to let it lie so that a slip of habit doesn’t make things awkward between them.

Or maybe, says the other part of him that refuses to be silent no matter how much he hushes it, he _did_ mean it. Maybe this magnetic pull Steve feels toward Bucky doesn’t just go the one way.

But it doesn’t matter. Even if that’s true, Bucky clearly knows as well as Steve does that it’s a force better left unacknowledged.

Steve resists the urge to reach up and press his fingers to the place where Bucky’s kiss still tingles.

_You aren’t allowed to want this_ , a corner of his brain reminds him.

With each beat, his heart responds, _But I do anyway_.

*

In the days that follow, Steve finds that things are coming back to him—only a little at a time, and nothing particularly important, but still there.

Usually, they appear without him realizing it, the information is suddenly just at hand where before there was nothing.

Picking up Alice one evening, he has a sudden flash of doing the same thing, only his hands were smaller, his arms bonier. He thinks he must be remembering from when he was fairly young, before whatever growth spurt he must have had between then and now. But he also remembers someone handing him their baby and holding it awkwardly in his large hands with the fear that he might break it. Like he wasn’t used yet to his own size. Perhaps the change had hit him quickly.

He wakes up another morning, maybe from a dream, with the absolute certainty that his nose has been broken at some point.

When Bucky tells him to pick another book for them to start reading aloud he chooses _A Tale of Two Cities_ , because it was his mother’s favorite. Bucky looks at him in surprise and Steve is surprised, too. He can’t remember her face, exactly, but he remembers walking in one day and finding her crying at their dining room table—he’d been alarmed, until she’d explained that her tears were for Sydney Carton. He’d scoffed then, with all the emotional superiority of a 10 year old boy. He tries to squeeze the memory for any other clues it might yield—but the edges are too blurred.

He doesn’t remember anything about how he ended up in the water or what might account for the vivid nightmares which continue to plague him.

But there are other, broader strokes of feeling that come to him. A sense of desperate yearning and dissatisfaction. A low burning flame of anger in the pit of his stomach. The impression that he has been lonely more often than he has not.

The last comes to him on one of their now typical morning outings, under the wide, brilliant sky, as he and Bucky let Alice clamber through the snow back and forth between them, her little face stubborn as she ploughs through it. He looks up across the space, beaming, and finds the same look reflected on Bucky’s face as their eyes meet. And that shared moment, the reflexive joy of it, feels rare to him. Like something he’d always sought but never found.

He may have felt happy before, he thinks, but he’d felt it alone.

It’s probably because Steve has gotten so used to that reliable little rush he feels when he looks around to find Bucky is reacting, too—when Alice does something funny, or they hit a good part of their book, or the weather is particularly pleasant—that he notices immediately when he searches for the exchange and doesn’t find it.

It’s afternoon and they’ve found their respective spots on the sofa and the armchair after a morning of snow and legos with Alice.

When Steve looks over the edge of the book after a particularly theatrical Madame Defarge performance, Bucky is staring instead into the fire. Steve chastises himself for being disappointed, because Bucky doesn’t _always_ have to be in a good mood just for his sake. But a few minutes later Alice goes up to him and sets a stuffed polar bear on his knee, lifting her arms to be picked up, and Bucky just looks down at her glassily for a long moment before lifting her into his lap with a sigh.

Steve shuts the book and sets it on the coffee table, leaning forward on a hunch to press the back of his hand to Bucky’s forehead.

“Bucky!” Steve says, half in exasperation, half in concern. “You’re burning up! Why didn’t you say you were feeling bad?”

Bucky looks up at him with the same absent gaze, and Steve can see now that he’s also flushed. He shrugs stiffly. “Didn’t seem like a big deal or anything.”

Steve huffs, picking up Alice from his lap. “Lay down on that couch right this minute. I’m putting Alice down for her nap and then we’ll see if you’ve got any medicine around here.”

“Bossy,” Bucky murmurs, although he’s already rising creakily from the armchair to obey.

By the time Steve comes down from settling Alice in her crib, Bucky is already asleep, too, sprawled on the couch at an uncomfortable looking angle. Steve pulls a blanket from the back of it, tucking it in around Bucky’s body. He puts his hand again to Bucky’s forehead, then the side of his neck, though it just confirms that Bucky is as hot and feverish as he’d seemed before.

Steve has a quick, fleeting memory of a cool hand on his own forehead, smoothing his hair back to place a damp cloth on his burning skin.

He pulls his hand away and Bucky shifts a little restlessly in its absence before stilling again.

It’s easy to find Bucky’s store of cold medicine under the bathroom sink and after reading a few bottles he brings Bucky two pills and a small cup of red syrup that he makes him wake up and drink before letting him flop back onto the throw pillow with a groan.

Until now, Steve and Bucky have had a fairly natural agreement in the kitchen—Bucky cooks, Steve cleans up. But it’s not too difficult after a little rummaging for Steve find the right ingredients to throw together a decent soup, grabbing a loaf of bread from the freezer to thaw while he cooks. It strikes him for the first time how incredibly organized Bucky is—everything exactly where you’d expect it to be. He wonders if he’s always been that way by nature, or if it’s something he had to learn in order to manage here on his own with the baby.

It’s a thought that intensifies when, before he’s even realized that the time has been passing, he hears Alice begin to cry over the baby monitor he’s set on the counter. He hastily dumps the vegetables he’s been chopping into the pot on the stove, rinsing his hands before she grows loud enough to wake Bucky.

His heart sinks a little when he opens the door and hears her thin wail, noticing that her nose is running and her little cheeks are red and tear streaked. Sure enough, when he picks her up she feels warm to the touch.

“Oh, angel girl,” he croons, picking her up and wiping her nose. “Not feeling good either?”

Alice just whimpers a little bit in reply, ducking her head against his shoulder and making unhappy noises.

The soup is already bubbling when he gets back down to the kitchen, and he rushes to make sure it doesn’t boil over, trying delicately to balance Alice in one arm and handle the food with the other as he’s seen Bucky do so many times. It’s not as easy as it looks.

He opts not to wake Bucky just yet, since he can see that he’s still sleeping fitfully. He gets Alice to eat a little and tempts her more with some frozen berries—usually something she responds to as a big treat, but soon she’s fussing again, her eyes screwed up with tears.

“Buck?” Steve says, softly, squeezing Bucky’s shoulder. “Do you have any kid stuff—medicine I mean? I don’t think Alice is feeling very well either.”

“Hmm? What’s wrong?” Bucky asks, groggy but alarmed, sitting up and squinting.

“Shh, it’s okay—she’s just a little off. Just tell me where the stuff is, I can take care of it.”

Bucky rubs his eyes and directs him to the children’s cold medicine, basically a miniature version of what he’d administered to Bucky earlier. To his relief, she accepts the dosage meekly, her fists wrapped in his sweater like she’s afraid he’ll put her down again.

When he returns to the living room, Bucky furrows his brow in concern, making himself stand up.

“I can—you don’t have to—” he sways on his feet, putting a hand out to steady himself on the back of the couch, the color draining from his face.

“Whoa, easy! It’s okay, Buck, we got it covered,” Steve says, trying to sound firm and reassuring. “Why don’t you go up to bed, huh? I can manage for the evening.”

Bucky shakes his head, but does slump back down onto the sofa. “I gotta…gotta stay where I can hear her.” He says, a bit of a rasp in his voice. “Can’t go to bed if she’s sick.”

“Okay, okay sure.” Steve says, soothingly, “But lay down for now alright?”

Bucky sighs, brow still creased with worry, but allows himself to sink the rest of the way back down.

Steve does his best to tidy up in the kitchen, then gives it up until later, finding that Alice is demanding all of his attention. He can tell that she’s still miserable, so he tries his best to coax her to sleep. He turns the lights off, leaving only the calming flicker of the fireplace. Eventually, he finds himself pacing a track around the living room, humming a tune he half remembers.

It takes a long time before she lets him put her down in her crib without immediately crying again—he tries two or three times, picking her up again almost at once and continuing his loop. But at last, he sets her down and gets only a feeble whine of protest, so he backs out of the room and shuts the door as softly as he can.

“Bucky,” he whispers, kneeling beside the sofa, pushing back the damp bangs clinging to his forehead. “Do you want to try to eat something?”

Bucky mumbles, and turns over facing toward Steve, eyes slitting open. “Alice?”

Steve smiles encouragingly. “She’s okay. Not anywhere near as warm as you, just a little unhappy—runny nose. I’ll keep an eye on her.”

“I should—s’my job, gotta—” Bucky makes a weak gesture with his hand, but doesn’t quite manage to rise.

“Don’t worry about it right now. You’re sicker than she is, you…you gotta feel better so you can be okay on your feet, right? I promise I can manage ’til then.”

Steve moves to get to his feet, but Bucky reaches for his hand and he stills at once.

“Dunno…dunno what I’d do without you,” Bucky whispers, and his eyes are bleary but fixed on Steve’s face.

Steve sinks back down to the floor and reaches with his free hand again to stroke Bucky’s hot forehead. 

“You’d—” Steve swallows trying to find his voice again and finding it unaccountably difficult. “You’d be okay, Buck. Haven’t needed help before, kept her safe and happy and perfect all on your own.”

Bucky’s eyes drift closed again and his voice sounds like it’s coming from a long way off. “It’s nice…not having to.”

He releases Steve’s hand, breath slowing down, and Steve’s sure he’s already falling back into a feverish sleep.

It takes a while for him to stand up again, anyway.

 

The next morning, neither of the Barneses are particularly improved, but neither one seems worse, either. It’s just a cold, Steve decides, nothing dangerous, but it’s enough to be contending with, anyway.

Steve unfolds himself from the armchair where he’d finally fallen asleep last night at the first sound of Alice waking upstairs, checking on Bucky on his way past.

Without their usual routine of activity, the day passes in a bit of a haze marked by doses of cold medicine, which Steve doles out carefully on the four hour mark, as per the instructions on the bottle. He coaxes both of them into clean clothes and hot food, and he isn’t sure who is the least happy about it—Alice is louder, he decides, but Bucky is more stubborn and Steve can’t manhandle him into compliance.

By the middle of the afternoon, to his relief, Alice’s fever is basically gone. She’s still snotty and cranky, but that he can handle.

When he puts her down for her afternoon nap, she looks up at him with limpid, resentful eyes, like he’s personally responsible for her plight and as he comes down the stairs he can’t help but break into a peal of laughter—Bucky is giving him the exact same look. They don’t always look so alike. Steve thinks that Alice must take after her mother in many regards, but their misery is point for point.

Bucky pouts harder as Steve laughs at him, setting his jaw mulishly.

“I hate being sick,” he says, shifting his limbs restlessly on the couch.

“Well, if you’re complaining about it, it probably means you’re feeling better,” Steve says reasonably.

“Fuck off,” Bucky says without any real heat. He turns bright eyes to Steve again, looking pathetic. “Read a bit to me? I’m bored as shit and I can’t sleep anymore.”

“You know, you’d probably sleep better if you’d just go to bed instead of having to be out here in the way.”

Bucky scrubs his hands over his face. “I know I just…let me pretend I could be helpful if she needed me, alright?”

Steve softens. “Of course you would.” Bucky’s mouth twists for a moment before looking away.

“So come’re and entertain me already.” Bucky sits up and scoots in his blanket cocoon to one end of the couch. 

“Yeah, yeah, hold your horses.”

Steve snatches up the book, hesitating for a moment, wondering if he should take the armchair. But Bucky nods expectantly at the other side of the couch, so he shrugs and plops down in his usual space. He wavers for a moment as he watches Bucky scrunch himself onto the far side of the sofa. He grabs a throw pillow and props it against his leg, waving at the stretch of open space.

“You can lie down if you want.”

Bucky chews his lip, uncertain, then slowly unfolds his limbs, scooting over so that he can rest his head on the pillow, tension bleeding out of his body.

Steve’s hand hovers for a moment, but ultimately comes to rest on Bucky’s hair, smoothing the pillow-ruffled strands.

“This okay?” he asks, quiet enough so that there isn’t a chance that his voice might creak.

“Mmm,” is all Bucky says.

“I…I was sick a lot. As a kid,” Steve says, absently, threading his fingers deeper into the brown curls. “My mom used to do this when I couldn’t fall asleep.”

“Yeah? Should you be…I hope you haven’t already picked this up from us. I’m sorry…” A line appears between his eyebrows, though his eyes are closed.

Steve chuckles wryly. “Nah. I don’t get sick anymore.”

“Why’s that?”

There’s a beat. “I don’t remember. But I don’t.”

Steve sets the book down on his thigh, resting his hand on top of the closed cover and giving all of his attention over to his fingers running through Bucky’s hair. Bucky’s fever is nearly gone, but his color is still high, hectically flushed and beautiful, his lips parted slightly as he drowses almost in Steve’s lap. His breath is softening, and his head getting heavier, so Steve knows that despite his protests, he’s already falling quickly back to sleep.

In the safety of Bucky drifting off, no longer listening to him, Steve begins to hum again the song he was humming earlier to Alice. Only this time the words come back to him and he realizes it isn’t a lullaby—but something he remembers playing on his mother’s radio when he was young. He’d considered it mushy stuff then. Now he sings softly, almost to himself.

_All of me, why not take all of me?_  
Can’t you see I’m no good without you  
Take my lips I wanna lose them  
Take my arms, I’ll never use them 

__

__

_You took the part that once was my heart  
So why not take all of me?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from Ingrid Michaelson's Men of Snow. 
> 
>  
> 
> _And winters come and my love, the winters go_  
>  And time stacks up in piles like winter snow  
> And everything you love and hold so dear  
> Won't really matter when we disappear


	3. The Horizon Is All We Have

Things are different between them after Bucky recovers.

He isn’t sure if it’s a direct result of it, of Steve caring for him and Alice, or something inevitable that would have happened sooner or later anyway.

Mostly, it’s the walls around touching that have come down. Before, Bucky had been intentional in keeping a (still friendly) distance. Now he’s powerless to stop himself from reaching out to straighten Steve’s collar, or to brush chalk dust from his cheek as he plays with Alice, or to squeeze his hand in thanks when he hands him a cup of tea.

And Steve doesn’t seem to be doing anything to hold himself back from the same, sending goosebumps up Bucky’s arms every time, no matter how often.

It’s both too much and not nearly enough.

Too much in that it’s more than Bucky should be taking or accepting—all the reasons he’d wanted to check himself in regard to Steve still as valid as they were those weeks ago (with the possible exception of Steve’s potential ambivalence. It seems very much at this point like he isn’t unaffected, either). But it’s not enough, not anywhere close to all he wants.

His resolve is eroding little by little.

Every day, Steve has been regaining pieces of himself—just not the full map. Each time he shares something with Bucky, something about a song his mother sang him or a fight he remembers getting into as a kid in school, Bucky feels the same conflict rise up in him. Selfishly, he’s glad to have these little glimpses of who Steve is without learning anything important enough to alter the way things are—but he can’t help beginning to wonder if there is a reason why the important stuff, the big pictures of Steve’s life, are the things that his brain will not show him. He’s afraid that whatever Steve’s mind is keeping from him, there’s a good reason why he doesn’t want to remember and it’ll crush them both when he does.

Bucky sighs and wraps his hands around his warm mug of coffee. Alice is upstairs having her afternoon nap and Bucky is watching Steve through the slightly frosted kitchen window, digging out the path to the door. Steve has absolutely put his foot down about either Bucky or Alice being outside for at least the week following being sick, but he’s taken it on himself to clear a track through the still heaped drifts left by the last storm.

As he watches, Steve stops his shoveling, wiping his arm across his forehead. He puts down the shovel and shrugs out of his coat and wool sweater, so that he’s down to just his long sleeved grey undershirt. He picks the shovel up and gets back to work.

Bucky glances at the thermometer—it’s twelve degrees out today. And Steve’s sweating in one layer of clothing.

These are the other moments where Bucky’s mind can’t quite decide what it wants to do.

He hasn’t forgotten the cut on Steve’s palm which closed up almost instantly (returning mentally to the day of the shaving incident and how those nicks had disappeared too, though he’d dismissed it at the time). It all makes the initial unlikelihood of Steve’s appearance _alive_ in the frozen waters of the inlet seem even more odd in retrospect. But what is he supposed to do with the information? He’s sure it’s important—maybe even vital to unlocking the ultimate question of Steve’s forgotten history. He’s just not sure he wants to. Not yet.

Still, the answers are stacking up around him like snow even if he refuses to ask the questions, and the drifts are growing high enough that they might collapse in at any time.

Maybe he should be building some kind of shelter around himself for the inevitable avalanche that’s coming.

Instead, he pulls a tray of enchiladas from the freezer to start thawing, because Steve will probably be hungry when he finishes his work.

Steve spends another hour or two toiling away outdoors as the sun sinks behind the mountains, eventually stomping back in smelling of crisp snow and sweat, color high and radiant and looking pleased with himself.

They have an early dinner and Alice is in high spirits afterward, getting back to her energetic self after several days of cold-induced grumpiness and lethargy.

“I think _somebody_ might need to let off a little bit of steam before she’s ready to sleep any more tonight,” Steve teases as he does his best to wipe mashed sweet potato off Alice’s cheeks while she grabs at the towel. “How about you play us what you know we want to hear on that fancy music machine of yours?”

Bucky shakes his head affectionately, going to comply. His sound system isn’t really even that elaborate, especially for a guy who worked in tech. If some of his old coworkers saw him still using the set-up he bought for his old guest room five years back, they would say he was slipping. Of course it works perfectly fine—Steve just seems to be endlessly fascinated by it.

“What we want to hear” this week for Alice is the soundtrack to some relatively new kids movie she has of course never seen but for some reason loves all the music from. He and Steve had a pretty good time one afternoon trying to guess the plot of the thing from just listening to the lyrics, without making much headway. Bucky doesn’t think that Steve’s guess about a talking bear with split personalities is right, anyway.

Alice fairly screams with delight when the squeaky voices of the singers begin the first verse of her favorite song, the peppy swell of the music filling the little house. Bucky can’t help but grin at her honest enjoyment of the things that make her happy. He scoops her up from her high chair where Steve is still trying ineffectually to clean her up, spinning away into the middle of the living room.

He bounces across the floor with her, swooping her up and down as she giggles madly, singing the whole time. Bucky may not love the songs as much as Alice does, but he’s heard them enough to know every single word by now regardless. Eventually she demands to be set on the ground, so that she can stomp her little feet to the music, as well. Bucky hunches over, holding onto her hands in some approximation of a two-step.

“I can’t wait ’til she’s bigger and can stand on my feet to learn how to do this,” Bucky says, glancing over at Steve with a grin. “Hopefully I can instill some better taste in music by then, too.”

“I dunno,” Steve says, waving his finger like a conductor along to the song. “I like this part. Buddy Bear finally realizing that the secret admirer leaving him love notes is himself—”

Bucky snorts. “I swear to god Steve, I do not think you understand children’s movies, that’s so fucking dark.”

Steve just chuckles, unconvinced. Bucky raises one of Alice’s chubby arms, giving her a little spin which ends up more like her just running in a circle holding onto his finger.

“What do you think she should learn first? Swing maybe? Or would a two-step be more useful? So she can impress whatever boy or girl she takes to prom one day with her skills…”

Steve shrugs, looking down at his hands clasped in his lap. A blush rises on his cheeks. “I, um…wouldn’t really know,” he admits, “never learned any of that stuff. Guess I’m probably too tall to stand on your feet at this point, huh?”

Bucky gapes at him, a little aghast at this deficit in his education. “So what’d you do at school dances and stuff—just like a high school stomp, turn in a circle? Or were you one of the ones grinding in a corner? Man you missed out, girls in high school really flipped if you could do a couple spins and shit.”

Steve blushes harder. “I didn’t uh—just never danced at all, I guess. Don’t remember any school dances anyway. Or later either.”

“Because you didn’t want to or…?”

Steve smiles at Alice instead of making eye contact with Bucky.

“Guess I just never found the right partner.”

Bucky looks at the half sad, half wistful expression on his face for a moment, then nods decisively.

“Well, we’ve gotta change that. Come’re.”

“Why?”

“I’m going to teach you—not standing on my feet though. You’re right, you’d crush them and then you’d have to carry me everywhere for the next month while they heal.”

Bucky releases Alice and points her in the direction of her toy corner, then heads over to change the music on the stereo. He flicks through on his laptop and finds a playlist called “1940’s Swing” and hits play. Glenn Miller starts up, the infectious first notes of “In the Mood.” Steve is still sitting at the dining table, hands gripped tight in front of him and back rigid with nervousness. Bucky beckons him encouragingly.

“Come on, it’s not that hard and I promise I won’t even try to dip you if you’re chicken,” he goads.

Steve rolls his eyes, seeing through exactly what Bucky’s doing, but rises from his chair anyway and steps into the center of the living room, hands awkward at his sides.

“Here.” Bucky takes them up in a loose grip. “Swing dancing is easy, you don’t even need to know that much for it to be fun. Just a side-side-rock step.”

He starts counting the beats for Steve, exaggerating his motions left, right, and backward so Steve can pick it up. Steve’s face is extremely serious, eyes glued to Bucky’s feet like he’s trying to memorize some kind of life-saving maneuver and he only has a minute to learn everything.

“Alright, I’m going to spin you now, I’ll make it easy. You’ll know it’s coming because I’m gonna drop one of your hands like this—” Bucky releases his left hand, “and lift the other one like this, so you just follow it right under.” Steve spins out away from him. “And then to bring you back to me, we’re gonna do kind of a backwards one to come back around, like so.” He guides Steve under his arm again, and then beams at him as he picks back up his left hand. “Now you can do an inside-outside turn!”

They fall back into step and Bucky moves Steve through the turn again, faster this time, watching as Steve’s look of grim concentration finally gives way to a half-smile, and then at last a real one.

“You’re a good teacher,” he says as Bucky spins him once more, this time at full speed, Steve coming back to face him in a fluid motion, floppy gold bangs falling across his forehead.

“And you haven’t stepped on my toes once, which means that you’re basically a natural.”

Steve ducks his head, losing the beat for a moment and looking at Bucky’s feet to find it again.

“Thanks,” he says without looking up.

The song comes to an end and Bucky lets their hands drop to their sides, but doesn’t let go of Steve’s fingers altogether.

The next one on the playlist starts and apparently some higher power of the universe or the spotify gods is either dead set against him or very much trying to help him out, depending on how he looks at it, because the voice that starts up is Ella Fitzgerald’s, singing “Cheek to Cheek.”

“This one’s slower,” Steve says, voice low. “Not sure I can tell what I’m supposed to be doing.”

Bucky clears his throat. “That’s because you can’t swing to it. Gotta do what the song says, right? Like this.”

He takes Steve’s left hand and places it gently on his shoulder, slides his arm around Steve’s waist and pulls him close. He rocks forward, pressing the side of his face to Steve’s, resolutely ignoring the voice saying he might be crossing a line he can’t uncross here.

“Cheek to cheek, see?” Bucky whispers. Steve gives a tiny nod.

Slowly, Bucky moves them around the small floor space, a kind of truncated box-step. _Slow, slow, quick-quick, slow._ He’s not really paying attention to what their feet are doing, to be honest, just turning slowly enough to still be considered something like dancing. But all he’s really aware of is Steve’s breath in his ear, a little shallow, Steve’s hand on his shoulder, large and tentative, and Steve’s chest pressed against his, warm and firm.

“Ladies love a man who can dance,” Bucky says keeping his voice low and tone even, pausing before he adds, feeling a little reckless, “Couple of the guys I’ve dated didn’t hate it, either.”

Steve’s shoulders tense.

“And you?” he asks after a moment, soft in Bucky’s ear.

“Yeah I…I guess I kind of love it too.”

Steve lets out a shuddering breath against him and Bucky stops moving his feet altogether, so that they’re just swaying in the center of the room, cheeks still pressed together. Steve grips Bucky’s shoulder, almost reflexively, and Bucky tightens his arm around Steve’s waist.

Steve pulls back after a moment, looking up at Bucky from beneath his long fringe of dark eyelashes. His lips are slightly parted and Bucky can’t help his eyes from dropping to them. Steve swallows hard, then looks up to meet Bucky’s gaze.

“Please,” he says, husky.

Maybe in a different moment, with a more critical eye, Bucky would wonder exactly what Steve was asking and whether he should really oblige. But right now he doesn’t wonder.

He tips his head forward and presses his mouth to Steve’s.

Steve sighs into the kiss like he’s been holding his breath and can finally let it go, and he kisses back gently, lips sliding across Bucky’s like a prayer. The hand on Bucky’s shoulder slips up to cradle the back of his neck, fingers twining in the curls at his nape.

Bucky lets his whole world narrow to the sensations of Steve’s mouth on his, not quite willing to believe it’s real but desperate to inhabit the dream of it for as long he can.

Steve’s hand tightens at the back of his neck and he presses forward, kissing a little more insistently, chasing Bucky’s lips. Bucky lets his mouth drop open and he sweeps his tongue lightly against Steve’s, shivering at the taste of him. Steve makes a small noise in his throat, releasing Bucky’s hand to wrap his other arm up around his neck as well, holding him tight.

Bucky links both of his around Steve’s waist and he tips forward on his feet, distantly thinking of pushing them backwards to lean against the back of the couch. But the thought is quickly dispelled at the feeling of a small, insistent hand clutching at his pant leg, demanding his attention.

He breaks away from Steve’s mouth with a small gasp, looking down at Alice, who is peering up at them curiously. Bucky steps out of the circle of Steve’s arms hastily, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth, the spell of the moment broken. At least, mostly broken, apart from the lingering, half-lidded glance Steve gives him before he, too, seems to shake himself free, smiling down at Alice.

“Guess it’s bedtime, huh?” Bucky asks her, finding his voice is full of gravel. He gives a sideways look to Steve. “Probably for the best.”

Steve ducks his head and Bucky can’t see his expression. Steve reaches down and lifts Alice up into his arms. “I’ll put her down,” he says softly, turning away to the stairs without waiting for a reply.

Bucky goes to sink down onto the sofa, knees a little shaky.

Fuck. What did they just do?

Bucky’s hands are trembling from the potent mix of elation and _oh no oh no oh no_ pumping through his veins.

Whatever that was, they can’t take it back. And _fuck_ he doesn’t want to. It’s still a bad idea, even if it feels like an inescapable one, something that’s been bearing down on them for days now—weeks even. But Steve—Steve still doesn’t even have a last name. He shouldn’t be…

Bucky’s brain bounces for several long moments between self-recrimination and replaying the moment in his head, running his hands through his hair. Then his spiral of doubt is halted by the sudden sound of Steve’s voice coming over the baby monitor on the kitchen counter, which he hadn’t realized was there, and he stills at once.

“ _There you go_ ,” Steve’s voice crackles over the monitor. Bucky jumps up and swipes it from the table, twiddling the volume lower almost guiltily as he listens in. “ _You had a big day, huh? Yams_ and _a dance party!_ ”

There’s a rustling sound and Alice making soft noises as Steve settles her into her crib.

“ _You know, I think you’re probably just about the luckiest girl in the world. Maybe you won’t always feel like that—but I hope you do._ ” There’s a pause. “ _I don’t really remember having a dad,_ ” Bucky is practically holding his breath at this point, the monitor to his ear, “ _so I guess even if I did he wasn’t anything like yours. He loves you more than anything._ ” Another pause. “ _And I guess this doesn’t matter so much, but I do too. My best girl._ ”

Bucky drops the monitor to the sofa, suddenly feeling like he’s done something wrong by listening in on this moment, even if it makes his heart feel about ten times too big for his chest.

Steve is a good, good thing. And he’s a good thing that he won’t just be ruining for himself if he’s just screwed this up. Steve _loves_ Alice. Steve just had his tongue in Bucky’s mouth. Everything feels all mixed up inside him.

He hears Steve’s footstep on the stair, and he darts up from the sofa, instinctively intending to flee to the safety of his room. To avoid whatever conversation will have to come next for long enough to catch his breath.

“Bucky,” Steve’s quiet voice stops him in his tracks, and he turns around warily.

“Where are you going?” Steve asks, stepping forward off the bottom step and squeezing Bucky’s arm.

“I—I’m sorry, about the—” Bucky falters, not quite meeting Steve’s eye.

Steve frowns, stepping in closer, and Bucky takes another small step back, finding himself hemmed in by the bookcase behind him.

“What are you sorry for?”

“I shouldn’t have—we still don’t even know who you are. _You_ don’t know who you are. I shouldn’t be taking advantage of you, Steve…”

Steve’s brows snap together at the last fumbling statement, and suddenly he’s even closer, crowding Bucky back against the shelves.

Bucky has a split second to take in Steve’s determined face and shift in his body language—to something commanding and powerful he hasn’t seen before—and to think _fuck, he could throw me around like a ragdoll if he wanted._ And then he’s crushing his mouth against Bucky’s—not anything like the tentative exploration from before, but hot and rough and demanding. His hands come up to cup Bucky’s face, holding him there.

“Does this feel like you taking advantage of me?” Steve asks, pulling back, his voice rough, thumb scraping over Bucky’s cheek.

Bucky closes his eyes, shaking his head minutely before Steve dives back in to cover his mouth, and his hands now fall to Bucky’s hip bones, pushing him against the shelves behind him and grinding his own hips into him distractingly. Bucky’s mouth drops open over an involuntary moan at the surprise of it, suddenly finding himself _so_ turned on and not in control of the situation at all as his body responds enthusiastically to Steve’s. Steve breaks away again, just far enough to ask,

“Does this? Are you taking advantage right now?” He slides one of his well-muscled thighs between Bucky’s, forcing his stance wider and dragging his thigh agonizingly between Bucky’s. Bucky can only clutch helplessly at Steve’s shoulders, trying to make himself think clearly for a second, but it’s impossible with Steve grinding into him, too aware of Steve’s hard-on evident against his own.

“No,” Bucky manages, breathily. No it decidedly does not feel like he’s at any kind of advantage here.

Steve leans in, kissing him long and filthy before breaking it this time. “Maybe you should be.”

“You want me to?” Bucky rasps, panting a little.

“Yes— _god_ hurry already ’fore a guy starts thinking he’s read this whole thing wrong.” His voice is gruff, but his face does show the edges of some worry.

The final thread of Bucky’s reluctance snaps. Whatever else there is, Steve hasn’t read anything wrong about how much Bucky wants him, and Bucky won’t let him feel like he’s imagined it on his own. If it’s a bad idea, it’s one they’re going to share.

He plants his hands on Steve’s chest and shoves him backward. It’s three tangled steps until Steve’s knees hit the couch and he sinks down, Bucky climbing over him to straddle his lap and bear down with his own hips, drawing a strangled groan from Steve as he thrusts up in return.

Bucky’s fingers find the hem of Steve’s long-sleeved shirt, whipping it up and off of him.

“Not reading it wrong,” he says, running his hands over Steve’s fair chest and stomach before he follows their path with his mouth, a nipping trail of half-kisses over his collar bones, his pecs, his ribs, just savoring the taste. His skin is still salty with sweat from working in the snow. He drags the edge of his teeth across one of Steve’s nipples earning another delicious, choked noise at the back of Steve’s throat. “Fuck, Steve—you’re perfect.”

Steve moans again, and struggles at the folds of Bucky’s heavy cable knit sweater. Bucky pulls back and yanks it and his undershirt off in one, falling forward again to feel Steve’s skin on his. Steve’s hands leave his hips to tangle in his hair, tugging him back in to kiss him feverishly while Bucky’s hands explore his back and sides, wandering and restless.

Steve’s hands in his hair tighten convulsively when Bucky nips at his neck, so Bucky does it again, harder, dragging his short nails down Steve’s shoulder blades at the same time. Steve yanks more deliberately, pulling Bucky’s head back so that he can get his own mouth on the column of Bucky’s throat, pulling their bodies flush together.

“I’ve wanted you so bad,” Bucky pants, between Steve’s kisses and the steady rock of their hips against each other, “didn’t think…never thought you’d—” he breaks off with a helpless noise as Steve slides his hands down and grips his ass, dragging Bucky even tighter against himself.

“Never knew anybody like you,” Steve says, his breath hot against Bucky’s neck. “Can’t believe you’re real, that you want me too…like this.” His voice grows breathy as he trails off.

“Believe it,” Bucky says, before his mouth finds Steve’s again.

Their kisses grows sloppier, open mouthed and gasping, focused more and more on the friction where Bucky is riding down against Steve, gaining speed and desperation.

Steve makes a small noise of frustration, straining up against him and Bucky concurs, pulling back and fumbling at Steve’s fly, yanking his jeans open before doing the same with his own.

Free of constraints, they still don’t move to touch, but the new, added sensation of sensitive skin against skin with their cocks sliding between them is almost overwhelming as it is, rutting against each other slower now, more purposeful. There’s more, so much more that Bucky wants with Steve eventually, but for this moment just chasing the pleasure of their bodies pressed together kissing messily feels too good to stop. Bucky links his arms behind Steve’s neck and Steve’s hands stay gripped on Bucky’s ass, moving with his steady motion.

It doesn’t take much longer before Bucky can feel himself getting close to the edge. He draws back a little to look at Steve’s wrecked face, eyelids heavy and mouth red from Bucky’s, open a little as he breathes heavily. He licks his lips and whispers, “Bucky.” The ragged sound of it is enough to tip Bucky over. His hips stutter and he tenses, and Steve, eyes fixed on his face as he comes, almost immediately moans and thrusts against him, mouth dropping open as he follows so that they’re both locked rigid against each other for a taut moment. Then they’re slumping boneless against the back of the couch in each other’s arms.

Bucky closes his eyes and buries his nose in Steve’s neck, counting out a few more beats by the tick of Steve’s heart pounding in his throat.

Then he sighs and staggers off of Steve’s lap to fetch a damp cloth from the kitchen counter to clean them both off.

“Remind me to throw that one out, okay?” he says with a little bit of a smirk, tossing the towel at Steve who only just manages to reach up and catch it, motion sluggish. “I don’t wanna have to think about wiping my daughter’s face off with something that might’ve had our come on it, even if it’s washed.”

Steve gives him a lazy salute as he cleans himself off. He lifts his hips to pulls his jeans back all the way up and button them, then kicks his legs up onto the sofa, stretching out and waving Bucky over.

“Come back,” he says, opening his arms.

Bucky obeys, flicking off the light as he goes and clambering over Steve’s body to lie half on top of him, tucking his head under Steve’s chin with a sigh. Steve wraps his arms around him, shifting a little to settle more comfortably, cooling skin to skin. He reaches behind Bucky and drags one of the sofa blankets over them, tucking it in around their bodies.

It doesn’t take long for Bucky to fall asleep to the steady, comforting thump of Steve’s heart under his hand.

*

Bucky spends the next day with a crick in his neck and a smile on his face that he can’t get rid of, even when his cheeks start to ache with it.

Both things are worth it every time he catches Steve’s eye (every few minutes, it feels, unable to keep their gazes from each other for longer than that) and sees the same thing reflected on his face.

Alice seems to have caught on to some of their infectious contentment, bouncing back and forth between them continuously with bubbling affection.

It’s a perfect, clear day—one of the days where you can see all the way out to the waning icepack on the still sea in one direction and every crisp, jagged line of the mountain range in the other. Steve deems it warm enough and both of them well enough to go outside to enjoy it, easily traversing the paths that he cleared out to the open snow field, where they make snow angels and a small band of snowmen that Alice crashes through with destructive glee.

They take her up to her bed together that night, Steve picking out fresh jammies from her drawer while Bucky changes her diaper, then snapping her up snug for sleeping. She’s tired out and soft in Bucky’s arms, blinking up slowly at them with her fingers in her mouth. Steve kisses her on her forehead and drops one on Bucky’s temple too for good measure before Bucky lays her down in her crib with a whispered “I love you Ali-gal.”

Bucky slips his hand into Steve’s as they exit quietly.

He leads him by their linked hands through the living room, switching off lights as they go, down the hall to the tower stairs.

At the doorway to Steve’s bedroom they pause and Steve raises his eyebrows a little shyly in question.

“Come upstairs with me?” Bucky asks in a hushed tone. “I want to show you something.”

“Okay,” Steve says simply, following him.

Bucky’s room is uncluttered but lived in, mostly comprised of the big unmade bed in the middle. Bucky sees Steve looking around curiously, interested in particular in his wall of assorted tech—his computer monitors and other things he uses only occasionally when he agrees to work on something for Tony, currently all turned off.

But they don’t linger there long; it’s not what Bucky wants to show him. Instead he makes his way across to where a stout set of wooden steps, so steep it’s really more a ladder than anything, disappears up into the ceiling.

At the top is Bucky’s favorite thing about living in this place and the reason he chose the smallest level of the lighthouse tower for his bedroom rather than one of the two cozier bedrooms in the main house.

It’s the home of the actual light, the one that some lighthouse keeper manned faithfully for the years that this place served a function along the coast. The huge, now defunct thing sits in its delicate cage in the center of the round floor, the whole room perhaps 10 feet across but only about two feet of walkway around the edge.

The space is fully encased in glass windows in every direction—the black ocean and equally black night sky spread out all around them, stars brighter than anything Bucky could have imagined living back in the city. Steve gives a small gasp of wonder as he comes up the ladder behind Bucky and Bucky turns to give him a hand up the rest of the way, eyes on his face as he takes it all in.

“This is…” Steve trails off, going to one of the windows looking out toward the dark sea. He doesn’t have to finish the sentence and probably can’t, but Bucky knows what he means.

“Yeah,” he says. “There’s something else I hope, but we’ll have to wait a little bit and see.”

Steve turns to him with a soft half-smile, holding out his hand to pull Bucky toward him. “I think we can manage that.”

Their mouths meet with a sense of relief, like coming home, though Bucky still feels the same frisson of electricity sparking down his spine as it did the night before. It feels new yet comfortable all at once, the way he tucks against Steve’s body and how Steve’s hands settle at the small of his back.

It’s not rushed. Since the dam has broken, it seems like neither of them have the same sense of urgency they’d had last night—the feeling like the moment was fleeting and would vanish if they didn’t seize it. Now it feels like they have as many moments as they want and rather than trying to squeeze everything in, they’re instead looking out across all they could or would do spread before them. And for the moment at least, Bucky doesn’t have room in his head for anything but that, worries fading like white noise.

So they lose time just like that, kissing slowly and exploring with their hands without immediate intent for anything else.

Before he realizes exactly how much time has passed, Bucky opens his eyes while Steve ghosts his lips down his neck and sees the beginnings of what he was hoping would make an appearance tonight.

“Steve,” he says with a sharp exhale, “look.”

Steve “hmms” vaguely, looking reluctant as he turns away from Bucky. Then he sees what Bucky’s pointing at and his eyes widen a little.

The horizon line separating the black mass of the ocean and the night sky is no longer invisible. The seam between them is starting to glow with a soft green light that illuminates the surface of the sea, glinting off the white ice in the distance. As they watch, the lights dance stronger and higher, taking on edges of purple and yellow amidst the green.

“The northern lights,” Bucky whispers. He turns Steve, who is watching them with his mouth open a little. Bucky wraps his arms around Steve’s waist from behind and hooks his chin over his shoulder so they can both look out at the magic happening in front of them.

“Aurora Borealis, I’ve never seen them,” Steve says with reverence. “I remember reading about them as a kid and thinking…thinking it couldn’t possibly look like what the book said. But it does. It’s even better.”

“I know. I still can’t really believe nature can just do that.”

Steve links his arms over Bucky’s, tipping his head to rest beside his.

“I’d say it’s beautiful, if that didn’t seem so completely inadequate. But I guess there probably isn’t a word that really does it justice, huh?”

“Probably not. It’s fun to try, though.”

They stare out in silence at the shifting, ethereal display for as long as it lasts—though all too quickly it’s dimming and receding again, leaving the sky lit only by stars.

Steve sighs and turns in Bucky’s arms, cupping his face in his hands.

“Thank you. For bringing me up here. For sharing this with me.”

Bucky finds that his eyes are suddenly and unexpectedly welling with tears. He blinks, embarrassed to be caught off guard.

“Never had anybody to share it with before. It was better like this.”

He knows that while he’s talking about the lights, he also isn’t.

They climb down the ladder back into Bucky’s bedroom silently. Bucky pulls Steve to his bed before Steve can even hesitate about returning to his own. Together they shuck down to single layers of clothing and crawl under the down blanket, wrapping up tight against each other.

“Steve,” Bucky whispers after a while, not sure if Steve is still awake.

“Hmm?” Steve responds, the noise humming through the top of Bucky’s skull tucked in under his chin.

“Did you—do you really not remember your dad at all?”

There’s a pause.

“You heard that?” Steve asks, finally.

Bucky scrunches a little in Steve’s arms, guilty. “Yeah I—the baby monitor was still on so I—sorry.”

Steve sighs, settling his arms in tighter around Bucky. “Don’t be. But yeah I…I don’t know. My ma I can remember pretty clear now. I remember that she got sick. And I was still pretty young when I lost her—”

Bucky’s hands clutch at Steve’s side impulsively. “I’m sorry.”

Steve shakes his head. “It’s okay. Point is I remember when I _did_ have her. For a lot of good years I think, I remember her loving me. But when I try to picture if my dad was around, I just get…nothing. Thought at first it was just the amnesia but…I think there might just not be anything to remember.”

Bucky gives a little puff of air against Steve’s chest, considering what he wants to say. In the enveloping darkness he finds that the words come easily in a way they would never in the light of day.

“I worry…” he swallows, hard. “I worry about Alice, sometimes. She was so little. It’s hard to even believe now how little she was. She won’t remember anything about her mom or—or having anybody but me.” He feels the tears pricking again at his eyes, and this time he doesn’t fight so hard to hide them, since the dark will do it for him. “About whether she’ll grow up and wish she’d had more than that.”

“No— _no_ ,” Steve says emphatically, gripping his shoulder. “She’ll wonder, maybe, and she’ll want you to tell her about what you both lost. But it won’t be because you weren’t enough for her Bucky. It’ll just be because she wants to know who she is, and you’re the one person who can tell her—but that’ll be another thing _you_ share with her.”

“It just…it really sucks that she doesn’t get us both, you know?” Bucky’s voice trembles a little as he voices for the first time a fear that resides deep in his heart.

“Yeah. It does. And you’ll probably both be sad over it at some points. But you love her hard enough for two to make up for it and she’s going to know you did your best.”

“I think—” Bucky clears his throat. “I think I’m afraid of what she’ll realize when she grows up because…because I _wasn’t_ good enough. Not at first. Not until Jen died and I had to be. I was barely around those first six months, too busy with my career and being successful and admired and whatever bullshit. And then it was just me and her and I knew that if she was stuck with just having me then I had to do everything I could for just me to be at least halfway decent for her.”

“So you moved up here?”

“Yeah. Where my piece of shit self couldn’t get distracted again and lose track of what matters.”

“That was brave.”

Bucky snorts derisively.

“I’m serious, Buck. You cut away all the stuff that made you who you were before because you wanted to become someone different for your daughter. No escape hatch. You put yourself on the line for her. You loved her that much.”

“I guess so,” Bucky says, quietly. Then, even more quietly, “You love her, too.”

Steve tenses a little, then sighs. “She’s easy to love.”

“Yeah,” Bucky agrees.

There’s a few beats of silence. “So are you.”

Bucky breathes out sharply through his nose, fingers tightening against Steve’s skin. Before he can parse how to reply to that startling implication, Steve’s hand is cupping his jaw, tilting his chin up to kiss him.

This time, their kisses grow intent and purposeful quickly, and Bucky tries to express everything he wasn’t able to find the words for with his mouth and hands and body as they move together in the dark.

*

Waking up next to Steve, Bucky thinks he’s the warmest that he’s felt since he moved to Labrador.

Steve’s body is a furnace and Bucky’s amazed to find that he’s kicked the blankets half off of himself in the night despite both of them being shirtless. As soon as he climbs out of the circle of Steve’s arms things right themselves, a chill creeping quickly over his skin as he gropes around for his discarded shirt and sweater. Steve mumbles something in a disgruntled tone and rolls toward the space he’s just vacated, reaching for him.

“Shh, don’t get up,” Bucky says, pushing Steve’s bangs back from his forehead. “Just wanna check my email before Alice wakes up and I forget again.”

Steve just grumbles. Bucky boots up his computer, feeling the impending sense of doom he’s never been able to get entirely out of the habit of feeling when it’s been a while since he’s checked his email. Logically he knows there’s absolutely nothing timely or important that he’s missing, that long engrained cloud of stress still forms anyway.

Predictably, he has only four new messages in the three days he’s gone without looking and two are spam. One is from Becca, which he’s reading with a smile when Steve huffs, slouching up against the pillows and watching Bucky through a blearily cracked eye.

Bucky looks over his shoulder at him with a smirk. “Morning, sleeping beauty.”

Steve scoffs. “You and your fancy machines—don’t understand how that can be better than staying here for a few more minutes.” He spreads his arms wide and gestures at the half-empty bed for emphasis.

“Hah! My fancy machines. I’ll have you know this thing hasn’t even had a system upgrade in like 18 months.” Bucky says, turning back to the screen, “practically antiquated.”

Steve flops back down on his side with a sigh. “A whole year and no new gadgets? Wow, what torture. You’re worse than Howard.”

Bucky frowns at the unfamiliar name, turning in his chair again. Steve’s eyes are closed, and he still seems to be in the process of waking up fully. “Who?”

“Howard,” Steve says with a massive yawn, “Stark.”

Bucky’s stomach drops dangerously.

“You…do you mean Tony? Tony Stark?”

Steve shakes his head, lazily, and doesn’t seem to catch the restrained worry in Bucky’s voice. “Howard Stark. The inventor—you know.”

“Right. Yeah I know of him.” Bucky says, carefully.

But his heart has picked up pace. Howard Stark, Tony’s father, has been dead for nearly 20 years. It’s not…impossible that Steve could have known of him. Maybe he was a nerdy kid who’d liked that kind of thing, read profiles about him or something.

He knows he’s rationalizing. That explanation and what Steve said don’t go together.

Somewhere, under the surface, he can hear the rumblings of the walls around him, reminding him that this is all due for collapse. In fact, if he thinks about this a little harder, if he asks Steve another question or two about it, he’ll undoubtedly set the avalanche in motion that brings all of it down.

He senses the final pieces of the puzzle hanging just above their heads, waiting to crash into place and change everything.

But he can’t. Not yet. Not _now_. They’ve only just…he just needs a little more time.

“Bucky?” Steve asks, a little more alertly.

Bucky takes a deep breath and turns, getting out of his chair to crawl back onto the bed. Steve’s normally well-ordered hair that he keeps parted slide-rule straight down one side is currently a mess, sticking up at the back from his pillow, and his cheeks are still pink and warm with sleep. He looks young and open. Not at all like a mystery, like something much more than he appears. 

Not like who Bucky, despite his wholehearted commitment to _not_ thinking about it, is beginning to suspect he may be.

“You okay?” Steve asks, a line forming between his eyebrows in concern. “Bad computer mail today?”

Bucky shakes his head, burying his face in Steve’s chest to hide anything that might be revealing itself on his face. He can keep a lid on this, if only he can hold onto it by himself for just a little bit.

“I just, I really like you.” He says, muffled into Steve’s skin. “Just thinking about how stupid lucky I am you ended up here.”

Steve huffs a little, wrapping his big arms around Bucky’s shoulders and holding him tight. “Lucky runs both ways, ya know.”

“You don’t understand, Steve. I’m not—you’re—you—” Bucky fumbles to express himself without completely unraveling, but Steve cuts him off.

“Hey,” he tightens his arms around Bucky and then flips them, quicker than Bucky can realize it’s happening, so that their positions are reversed—Steve’s arms around Bucky’s waist, chin resting on his chest to look up into his face, pinning him still. “I don’t know what’s got that look on your face right now but if it’s...if it’s because I still don’t remember everything I want you to understand: I remember enough. I remember enough to know that you’re something I’ve been looking for a long time and never ever thought I’d have. When I tell you I feel lucky to have this…you gotta believe it’s because I know for sure it’s true. Okay?”

Bucky nods, feeling his chin pull a little bit at the suppressed mix of happiness and loss he feels looking at Steve’s blue eyes, intent and earnest on his own. He pushes the thought away. He hasn’t lost anything, not yet. Steve’s here. He’s right here.

He pulls Steve up to kiss him, losing himself to the nearness and solidity of Steve’s body pressing his into the mattress until Alice’s wakeful cries over the monitor break them out of their bubble and it’s time to face the day.

 

Bucky watches over the rim of his coffee mug as Steve sits beside Alice’s highchair at breakfast, feeding her bites of eggs and fruit that end up about half on the ground around her instead of in her mouth. He realizes that he’s gotten used to the previously unheard of luxury of being able to drink his first cup of coffee with both hands, in peace, before having to do anything else. It just reminds him of how in a little over a handful of weeks Steve has infiltrated their lives, become a part of the fabric of it in ways he’s sure he hasn’t even really thought about yet.

Steve glances over at him, curious, and Bucky tacks on a smile. It seems to be convincing enough, so Steve returns the smile and goes back to plying Alice with pieces of mushy peach. She plucks one from his fingers and immediately smashes it into her own hair, grinding it in and laughing as a trail of juice drips down her forehead.

“That’s going to be a fun clean-up for you,” Bucky says, watching her smear the rest of it down her bib.

Steve rolls his eyes heavenward. “You mean for you? I’m pretty sure I’ve got dishes to do…”

“Oh, that’s how it is?” Bucky asks, mouth quirking.

Steve shoots him a smirk. “Guess I could do it if you plan on making it up to me.”

Bucky snorts softly, eyes lingering on Steve’s lopsided grin before taking in the rest of him. He’s still morning rumpled, hair sticking up in the front from trying to shove his bangs back from his face. He’s wearing one of Bucky’s favorite sweaters, absently plucked from the back of his desk chair as they’d dressed in a rush to get Alice up —a soft navy blue fisherman style that he likes because it doesn’t show things like mushed peach and feels like wearing a hug. Looking at Steve in it, with the sleeves pushed up over his forearms, gives his heart a twist. It’s not like Steve’s been wearing anything _but_ Bucky’s clothes since he arrived, but it feels different, intimate, seeing Steve in one of his favorites, donned as they dressed hurriedly together after tumbling out of a shared bed.

“What do you want to do today?” Bucky asks.

Steve smirks wider. “Was that supposed to be a non sequitur or is it a come on? I mean I’m fine with it either way—”

Bucky snorts into his coffee, “Non sequitur! Jeez. Didn’t think I had to make specific plans for that anyway…”

Steve raises his eyebrows, chuckling. “Presumptuous. But okay yeah, today…I dunno, looks pretty nice out? Think a lot of the snow is gone from the beach maybe. Take a little walk or something. Could finish _Rebecca_ if you’re feeling ambitious. What’d you have in mind?”

Bucky gets up, stacking his and Steve’s breakfast plates with one hand and his now empty coffee mug in the other. He pauses beside Steve’s chair to drop a kiss on the corner of his mouth.

“Sounds like a perfect day to me.”

 

It nearly turns out that way.

They all zip into their snow gear, Bucky winding a scarf around Steve’s neck for him just because he can.

Steve is securing Alice into her mittens, making sure they’re clipped on to her jacket cuffs while Bucky waits, and he tucks a hand absently into his pocket. He finds that his fingers brush against something small and hard, and he pulls it out for a closer look. It’s the gleaming shard of abalone he’d found on the beach just before he and Alice found Steve. Bucky smiles, slipping it back in and zipping the pocket shut.

Steve offers to wear Alice in her pack and Bucky happily lets him. The girl may seem like she ends up with half her food ground into her hair and the tray of her highchair, but she must be eating some of it because closing in on a year and a half old she’s getting _heavy_. Plus, Bucky has to admit, he still can’t really resist seeing Steve with her. He shoulders the pack and lets Bucky clip her in easily. She wraps her fat, mittened fists into the back of Steve’s scarf and cheers as they head for the door. Bucky let his eyes trail over the line of Steve’s broad shoulders beneath the straps of the baby carrier.

“Hey Buck?” Steve says, as he unlatches the chain and undoes the lock on the front door.

“Yeah?”

“Remember when you weren’t sure if you had any pants that could handle my ass?”

Bucky sputters a surprised, undignified sound.

“You’re checking right now to see if you did, aren’t you?” Steve teases, merciless, looking over his shoulder to smirk at Bucky’s red face.

“I—that is _not_ —” Bucky chokes. Then he runs a hand over the back of his neck, “Fuck. I really thought you’d forgotten about that.”

“Forget about 30 seconds of sheer terror and delight where I tried to figure out if my handsome literal life-saver was coming on to me before he fled the room to avoid further comment? Unlikely.”

Bucky groans, but he’s laughing too. “I’d hoped introducing Alice in her extra puffy pink unicorn snowsuit would make you forget. Or you know, just trigger your actual amnesia again for my own benefit.”

“Dastardly,” Steve remarks, dryly. “Exploiting both your child and my fried brain cells to get out of owning up that you wanted to get into my pants.”

“I mean, point of order, I _think_ it’s you who’s wearing _my_ pants, so that doesn’t really—”

“Oh! Funny huh? Well joke’s on you because I did get into them and then I did again and your pants handled it like a champ both times.”

Bucky chuckles, swatting at Steve as they exit the mudroom. “Jerk.”

“Punk,” Steve shoots back, fondly.

Bucky lets him have the last word. He’s pretty sure Steve would’ve gotten it eventually anyway. But as they step out to walk side by side along the cleared path, Steve moves in close and tucks his hand into the back pocket of Bucky’s snow pants, pulling him close, so he doesn’t mind.

Eventually, they reach the end of the cleared paths and have to break apart. Bucky moves ahead to walk in front of Steve so he’ll have footprints to walk in since Steve has Alice on his back.

It’s the first of the truly decent spring days they’ve had yet, the temperature hovering just around freezing, which feels practically temperate in comparison to the winter behind them. So instead of making his way around the house to the snowy field as they’ve usually done for quick exercise outings, Bucky instead cuts out toward the water to follow the cliffside.

In the spring and summer when the snow is gone, the long slope from the foothills behind them will fan out here to be covered in green grass dotted with flowers. One of his favorite walks on those days is this path along the cliff that drops away to the ocean below, framed by mountains ahead of them and the sea to the right. It’s still snowy now, with the green and flowers probably two months off yet, but the sky is crystal clear and the mountains stand out jaggedly against it in high relief.

They wend their way along the cliffs for a ways, Bucky humming Buddy the Bear’s song from Alice’s kid movie soundtrack without realizing it, until Steve cuts in to belt along at the top of his lungs. Bucky laughs and sings along too, Alice chanting incoherently and flapping her hands against Steve’s shoulders.

Bucky’s starting to puff a little in the frigid air, so he figures it’s time to turn around and head back. He shakes his head when he turns and Steve raises his eyebrows in question—Steve isn’t even breathing harder than normal. Still, he agrees pleasantly enough when Bucky suggests they start making their way back to the lighthouse, again letting Bucky take the lead so he can follow with Alice. Bucky checks her quickly first, making sure her little hat is still tied snugly in place around her ears and that she hasn’t managed to shuck either of her mittens. Her cheeks are pink with the cold, but not worryingly so since she’s tucked up against Steve’s back, soaking in his warmth like a personal space heater.

The frosty air is bracing and invigorating in Bucky’s lungs as he sets off again, even if his ears are starting to sting a little. Now that they’re retracing their own footsteps, the hike gets easier too, freeing him to cast his eyes more out over the expanse of the sea and up toward the mountains, letting himself look forward more and more to summertime and green things reappearing.

He hadn’t been quite able to enjoy it fully last year as he and Alice had just moved in and he was struggling to adjust to single parenthood and becoming what Alice needed. But this year he’s got his feet under him, as much as anyone can with a rapidly growing toddler, he thinks, and he’s anticipating long days spent outdoors and soaking in the sunshine. Bucky thinks about laying out a blanket on the grass and letting Alice roam around them and about how Steve’s golden hair would gleam in the sunlight.

Possibly, it’s because he’s caught up in those thoughts that Bucky doesn’t notice when his feet stray a little too near the snow covered edge of the sea cliff.

And thanks to the innocent blanket of snow covering the ground, Bucky feels before he sees the ledge that he’s standing on start to crumble beneath his feet.

His ankle rolls out from under him as the ground he’s standing on suddenly lurches away, sliding down toward the rocks and ocean below, and he tips sideways, losing his footing and grabbing at empty air.

He has just a split second long enough to think, _Alice is with Steve—she’s safe_ , before he’s falling with the rest of the ledge into nothing…

And then he’s airborne—but it isn’t the pitiless black water he’s pitching toward. Instead there’s a tug at the back of his neck, reversing his momentum and sending him flying impossibly fast and far in the opposite direction. There’s no time to understand what’s happened before the ground rushes up to meet him again and he crashes with limbs at all angles in an enveloping shroud of white.

Bucky sits up slowly, his heart racing and his mind utterly blank over the fact that he’s still alive. Miraculously alive, in fact, and sitting in a drift of snow—a full 30 feet from the cliff’s edge from which he should have just disappeared.

His heart is in his throat and he slumps back for a moment, afraid he’s going to throw up with the shock.

The ground had definitely been plunging to the bottom of a 200-foot rock face into the sea, and him with it.

“Bucky!” Steve says, throwing himself to his knees in front of him, face aghast. “Bucky are you—did I hurt you?” he gasps, reaching out to run his hands anxiously along Bucky’s arms and legs as if for broken bones.

“Did you—what?” Bucky asks, dazedly, eyes still fixed on the place where the edge of the cliff is now a good four feet narrower than it had been two minutes before, though you’d never know now as it sits quietly under a deceptively unblemished mantle of white.

“I didn’t think—I just grabbed you, to get you out of the way—but I didn’t mean to—I _threw you_.” Steve’s voice cracks, and he continues with barely restrained panic, “Please look at me, tell me if you’re hurt—Bucky—”

Bucky drags his eyes away from the sea wall to Steve’s face, which is pale and anguished before him as he crouches in the snow.

“I’m—I’m _fine_ ,” Bucky says, a little incredulous. “How can I—I was falling…”

Steve nods rapidly. “I heard the ledge going and I saw you start to—I just grabbed the back of your jacket to haul you out of the way but then I—I don’t know how I—you just flew back out of my hands—I could have _killed_ you—”

Bucky takes a deep, shuddering breath, beginning to understand what Steve is saying—what’s just happened—and he reaches out and grasps Steve’s hands in his own, stilling them.

“You didn’t kill me Steve—jesus you—you saved me. I was falling. It’s at least two hundred feet into frozen water here. I’m okay—I’m _okay_.”

And it’s true. Bucky shifts his limbs, cautiously, finding that the only thing wrong with him is shock. His heart is still bounding and tripping, but his body is intact. Because Steve had reacted to the split-second cracking of the rock and flung him out of the way, one-handed, across 30 feet of space.

“Bucky I’m—I’m sorry,” Steve says again, clearly as shaken as Bucky is, unable to listen to his reassurances. “What did I do?” he trails off the last in a whisper, dropping his head to Bucky’s shoulder.

Bucky doesn’t know what to tell him.

Alice makes a concerned noise from over Steve’s shoulder, peering down at Bucky with a furrowed brow, catching their energy. Her face begins to crumple and go red as it does just before a storm of crying hits, so he forces himself to take a few deep breaths to calm down.

“Hey, it’s okay, sweetheart, we’re okay. Nothing to cry about, everybody’s okay,” he chants, soothingly, bringing one hand up to hold onto hers and the other rubbing a circle in Steve’s shaking shoulder. He doesn’t know who he’s most trying to convince, but he knows they all three need to hear it.

Alice allows herself to be talked out of building into the full blown hysterics that were threatening to break, the wrinkles smoothing out of her forehead.

Steve finally lifts his face up from Bucky’s shoulder too, releasing the iron grip he has on Bucky’s upper arm, though his cheeks are still ashen.

“You almost…” Steve says.

“I know.”

“I didn’t think, I just…”

“I know.”

“I didn’t know I could do that. I don’t know how I _did_ do that.”

Bucky sighs, and says once more, softly, “I know. I know, Steve.” He reaches up to cup Steve’s pale cheek in his gloved hand. “Let’s just focus on getting back for now, okay?”

Steve nods and rises from his haunches, reaching down to pull Bucky from the crater of snow around him.

They march back silently, forging a new track through the snow that’s several yards further from the cliff than their original one, toward the tower of the lighthouse rising starkly against the brittle blue sky.

Bucky sheds his winter things haphazardly when they reach the mudroom. He turns to find Steve still fumbling at the fastenings of his own, fingers seemingly too stiff and shaky to work them. Bucky steps toward him, brushing his hands out of the way to help, thinking distantly that at the very least he is grateful that somewhere in the last year he’s become the kind of person who can pull it together when he needs to. When Alice and now Steve need him to, despite the fact that his own hands want to shake and his chest feels hollow as the remaining adrenaline bleeds away. But he can push that aside for the moment. Steve clenches his jaw tight.

“I’ll take Alice up,” Bucky says, lifting her from the pack, not waiting for an answer.

He takes her up to her bedroom and peels her out of her several warm layers. He dries the little curls that escaped her hat to get dampened with snow before dressing her back up into a fresh onesie for naptime. Alice is tired but cheerful, giggling and grabbing onto his hands and trying to stick his fingers in her mouth while he does his best to snap up her outfit.

Bucky scoops her up from the changing table, turning toward the crib to lay her down. He needs to go talk to Steve, make sure he’s alright, only…that thought finally makes Bucky’s mind land back on what just happened. The cliff, the ocean, the hand at his neck, the sensation of flying, the look on Steve’s face after he’d tossed him from danger without a second thought.

Bucky finds that he can’t quite put Alice down.

Instead, he sinks down, sitting cross legged on the floor with his back against her dresser, her warm little figure clutched to his chest as he rocks her back and forth.

“Oh honey, oh my girl,” he hums thoughtlessly, burying his nose in her hair as she clutches at his neck. “I won’t let you lose me, I promise, I promise. Gonna be careful. But it’s okay, it’s okay Steve was there. Steve made sure I came home with you. And we’re going to be alright, you and me.”

He doesn’t really think about what he’s saying and he can feel Alice growing heavy with sleep in his arms, but whatever it is, he needs to say it for himself if nothing else.

There are crashing waves of loss and emotion battering at each other in his chest.

Bucky could have died, if not for Steve. Alice could have lost him, too, but she didn’t. He’s here and they’re not going to lose each other.

But because of it, Bucky is fairly certain that he _is_ going to lose Steve. The healing, the strength, the other idiosyncrasies—Bucky has been able to ignore them all. But what Steve did today to save him was beyond all of those, it was impossible, inhuman. Bucky can’t deny what happened and Steve can’t pretend away who he is anymore either.

And Steve Rogers— _Steve Rogers_ —can’t just wash up on a beach and live out his days without the world ever knowing anything about it. It wouldn’t be right. And Steve Rogers never failed to do the right thing.

Neither has Steve, just Steve, the man Bucky has come to know—even come to love, he thinks with calm resignation—who has lived quietly beside him but who undeniably bears the same goodness as the man Bucky grew up reading about in his history texts.

And like that, the gap between the two of them—Captain America Steve Rogers and _his_ Steve shrinks again, with a sensation like a fist closing around his lungs.

Bucky swallows, thickly, and stands. It doesn’t do him any good hiding here with Alice. It doesn’t change anything. It’s time to face the music.

He lays her down in her crib, where she settles heavily without even stirring, worn out by the morning’s outing.

Then he heads back down the stairs to find Steve.

Steve is sitting on the sofa in the living room, elbows propped on his knees with his head in his hands. At the sound of Bucky on the stairs he looks up. There are deep lines around his mouth and a crease between his eyebrows.

“I made some tea.” He nods his head at two still steaming mugs on the coffee table.

“Good idea,” Bucky says, moving to sink down on the other end of the couch. He leaves some space between them, like he would have a few days ago. The expanse of empty cushion feels much more gaping now than it ever did before they knew what it felt like to close it.

He picks up one of the two mugs of tea for something to do with his hands, inhaling the comforting scent of peppermint and letting the heat of the ceramic warm his stiff fingers. Steve leans forward and grabs the other, immediately throwing back several gulps despite the fact that the liquid is still piping hot enough to burn the tongue.

They sit in silence for a while, sipping slowly at their mugs, neither really looking at the other. Bucky doesn’t know how to begin. To cross the gulf and say what needs to be said.

They finish their tea. Bucky sets his empty mug back on the coffee table and Steve follows suit, finally meeting his eyes.

Steve’s face is clouded, but Bucky notes that the expression lacks the lost quality is it has sometimes had over the past weeks, when Bucky caught him looking troubled. He supposes it’s because he isn’t lost anymore. They both found him today, for better or worse. And Steve just looks weary.

“Come here,” Bucky says quietly, extending an arm.

Steve obeys at once, crawling over to lean into Bucky’s arms with a sigh, burying his face in Bucky’s neck. Bucky wraps his arms around Steve’s broad shoulders and breathes deeply for a few moments, drinking this moment in as he counts down the heartbeats before things have to change between them. Though he knows that’s unrealistic. Things have changed already. They just haven’t named it yet aloud.

“Steve,” Bucky says, feeling the breaking of the silence as something violent, though his voice is soft. “I have to tell you something. I think I know who you—”

“Wait, please—” Steve cuts in, pleading, pulling his face back to look into Bucky’s. The line between his brows deepens. “I know what you’re going to say but please just—wait.”

Bucky shakes his head, sadly. “I don’t think we can wait anymore.”

Steve’s face crumples a little and he ducks his head again to Bucky’s shoulder. “I know. I know we have to—it’s time. I know we can’t put it off forever, but please just—just give me today.”

He pauses, taking a deep breath in Bucky’s arms before he meets his eyes again. This time there’s something more resolute there.

“Who I am—who I was…we’ve both been wondering for a while now and I _wanted_ to remember but…now that I have an idea of it I—” he breaks off, working his jaw as he searches for the words. “All the pieces are there now, I know. The door isn’t locked and I’m gonna have to open it and remember everything but…but you know what I remember most now that it’s come back to me?”

Bucky shakes his head, mutely, transfixed by the intent blue of Steve’s gaze.

“I remember that my whole life all I ever wanted was to do the right thing. To be enough for everybody. And I never felt like I was. Until I came here. So just…just let me be enough the way I am for one last night? Please.”

Bucky feels his heart cracking down the center and he nods fervently. “You are— _god_ Steve you’re more than enough, you’re—”

Steve doesn’t wait for the rest of his fumbling reassurances, leaning in to press his mouth to Bucky’s. It’s chaste and almost shy, somehow even more uncertain than their first had been, as if Steve isn’t sure that Bucky will accept it.

Bucky raises a hand to cup Steve’s jaw, angling his head to return it fully. Whatever has changed, Bucky wanting to kiss Steve back isn’t one of them. He pours that certainty into the movement of their mouths against each other as Steve’s lips part to let him in deeper.

Bucky shifts his body, moving to put his back to the arm of the couch and one leg on either side of Steve, pulling him up to press their bodies flush. It soon grows heated, hungry open-mouthed and full of need. Steve’s hands come up to press across Bucky’s lower back, pulling him closer.

All of Bucky’s nerves feel raw and exposed, the legacy of the shock and adrenaline that was coursing through him not too long ago. Steve’s mouth and hands feel hot enough to brand him. 

_So warm, his body is so warm—how did I never think about it?_

They leave trails of heat behind as Steve runs his hands across Bucky’s ribs, his arms, his neck, grasping at him restlessly and never settling.

When he wraps a hand under Bucky’s thigh, fingers digging into the inner seam of his jeans, Bucky groans, the sound jarring amidst the whispering hush of their breathing. The noise draws an answering moan from Steve, whose hips grind against Bucky’s as they break their kiss. Steve fumbles feverishly at the hem of Bucky’s shirt, shoving it up to get his mouth on Bucky’s bare skin.

“You’re enough Steve, you’re perfect, always been good enough,” Bucky finds himself murmuring as he strokes his fingers through Steve’s golden hair. Steve lets out another strangled sounding moan and nips his teeth and tongue across first one of Bucky’s nipples and then the other, rendering him incoherent as Steve trails his lips down his sternum.

Steve pushes himself back for a moment, bracing himself with an arm beside Bucky’s waist as he tugs with the other hand at the neck of his sweater. Bucky catches on and helps him tug the thing up and off, pulling his own the rest of the way over his head and tossing it aside as well. Steve sinks back down against him, picking up where he left off, large hands splayed against either side of Bucky’s rib cage to hold him in place.

His trail of hot, bruising kisses continues lower across Bucky’s stomach until he has to shift backward on the sofa. Steve slides a hand down over Bucky’s abs to hook his fingers in the waistband of his jeans, pulling the fabric just far enough to brush his lips across the highly sensitive skin beside his hip bone and Bucky gasps a little.

Steve kisses again, open mouthed to flick his tongue across the skin just below Bucky’s navel and traces his hand agonizingly lightly down Bucky’s inner thigh. It’s enough to make his intentions clear, which sends a searing curl of heat through Bucky’s lower belly and makes his back arch a little out of his control.

Steve looks up at him with half-lidded eyes, fingers hovering over the button of Bucky’s jeans.

“Let me?” His voice is already hoarse and promising all kinds of things that flash through Bucky’s mind as he just nods his consent helplessly.

Steve’s previous hungry urgency slows to something torturous as he undoes Bucky’s pants and slides them carefully down his hips, following suit with his underwear at the same excruciating pace. Bucky can’t help but push his hips up, urging him to hurry, but Steve settles the firm heel of one palm against his hip bone, forcing him still against the couch cushion. Bucky lets out a small desperate noise in the back of his throat and Steve flicks his eyes to Bucky’s face, mouth curled.

Finally he pulls Bucky free, meeting his eyes once more before dipping his head to get his mouth on him. Bucky’s pretty sure his eyes roll back in his skull for a moment, because the heat of Steve’s kisses is nothing to the heat of his mouth wrapped around Bucky’s cock, tentative and exploring with his lips and tongue. Steve brings his free hand to wrap around Bucky as well, holding him in place to take the rest of him into his mouth.

Bucky feels like he’s going crazy, flying apart with the sensations that are so good, but the want in his gut, which says _more, more, more_.

Steve’s motions are still slow and exploratory, as if he’s studying Bucky thoroughly. He isn’t hesitant, but the way he’s touching Bucky is purposeful enough to make Bucky wonder if this isn’t something Steve _does_. Not because it’s anything less than revelatory—he finds himself barely able to think around the fire in his belly—but because Steve seems so deliberate about it. The thought is unaccountably even hotter, that this might be something Steve has offered only to him, and Bucky’s hips buck against Steve’s iron grip. His hands wrap tightly in the silky strands of Steve’s hair as a groan drops again from his throat.

It must do something for Steve, too, because he moans and twists his hand, making Bucky’s head tip back to the arm of the sofa, all thought silenced as he just _feels_.

Steve seems to warm to his efforts, no longer teasing but working Bucky over with his hand and mouth, pushing Bucky closer and closer to the edge. Bucky opens his eyes to watch him, catching Steve’s hazy gaze. He sees that Steve is incredibly hard in his still buttoned up jeans, as yet untouched. Steve notices where Bucky’s eye line has landed and groans, his eyes fluttering shut, and he reaches down to palm over the front of his jeans. He looks up into Bucky’s eyes as he does it again, his mouth leaving Bucky for a moment as he takes in a sharp breath.

Knowing that for all his teasing Steve is just as far gone as he is sends yet another sharp jolt of heat through Bucky, and with it the driving need to see Steve fall apart for him.

He drags Steve back up his body, kissing him roughly and flipping them over on the couch. Steve allows him to without resistance so that their positions are reversed—Steve lying back on the arm of the sofa and Bucky hovering above him. Bucky dips in to kiss at the hollow of Steve’s throat, lips lingering as he yanks open Steve’s jeans and tugs them down over his hips.

Steve is mumbling his name, _Bucky Bucky Bucky_ , against his mouth as Bucky takes them both in hand.

It’s only a matter of a few more breathless moments of fractured sounds and Steve arching underneath him as his hand works over both of them before they’re each tipping over the edge—Steve’s eyes snapping shut with a gasp the only warning Bucky has, then he, too, is coming with a flicker of flame washing across his nerves.

Steve’s body goes loose beneath him, but Steve reaches up to grip Bucky’s face in his hands and give him one final scorching kiss before Bucky gets up to fetch a towel. He cleans them up and then slumps against Steve again, letting the heat from his skin keep the chill of the room at bay for the moment. Steve wraps his arms around Bucky, tucking him under his chin.

“We can have today, right?” He asks, softly, voice a little hazy. “Just one more day of this.”

“Yeah,” Bucky says, swallowing the lump that threatens to rise in his throat. “Yeah, we can have today.”

*

They finish reading _Rebecca_ , Steve’s performance lacking some of its usual zeal, although he tries his best.

Alice wakes up and Steve draws with her at the table while Bucky cooks dinner. The minutes tick by, relentless.

They put Alice to bed late, Steve holding her against his chest for a long time after she’s fallen asleep, nuzzling in her hair.

They sit up in front of the fire, hands clasped between them for as long as they can, drawing the evening out one log at a time. But eventually they are both nodding off against the back of the sofa and the final chunk of wood has collapsed into nothing but glowing coal.

They go to Bucky’s bed and fall asleep tangled close as possible, as if they can conserve the precious time by sacrificing any space between them.

 

Bucky wakes before Steve, his body well-trained to a baby’s schedule by now, though Alice doesn’t show any signs yet of stirring on the monitor. He figures she needs the sleep as much as they both did after a long day yesterday and a late bedtime. The sun is just creeping up over the ocean beyond the lighthouse windows, not enough pouring into the tower room yet to wake Steve.

Bucky decides it’s best to let him sleep. It will be easier for him to do what has to be done next on his own, anyway.

He creeps from the bed, carefully disengaging his limbs from where Steve is still wrapped around him. Steve stirs a little, reaching for Bucky restlessly as he goes, but ultimately doesn’t wake, snuggling down again into the down comforter and curling his arm around Bucky’s vacant pillow.

Bucky pulls on his heavy flannel robe and swipes his sat phone from the desk, making his way silently over to the ladder up into the light room.

Up here with windows on all sides, the cold dawn rays are stronger. Bucky stands at the glass for a few moments, the phone cradled in his hands, letting the chill from the panes creep into him. Before he can think any harder about it, he punches in Tony’s number and waits for the ring.

It’s early, but Tony is a noted insomniac and Bucky will be surprised if he isn’t up anyway tinkering around in his lab. Even if he isn’t, Bucky thinks bitterly, what he’s got to say is worth waking the fuck up for and he won’t feel bad about inconveniencing Stark. He needs to do this now or never.

“Buckaaaaarooni!” comes Tony’s unsurprisingly chipper voice on the other end of the line. “How you doin’ you frozen son of a bitch? Hope you’re calling to tell me you’ve finally come to your senses and you’re ready to rejoin the living—”

“Tony,” Bucky cuts him off, warningly.

It doesn’t faze Tony, who barrels on. “If it’s about your kid, you know Stark Industries has a childcare in the building right? Or at least, it will the minute you tell me you wanna come back and I’ll get Pep to set it up for you—”

“ _Tony_ ,” Bucky says again, louder, and Tony shuts up. Though Bucky can hear clanging and mechanical sounds in the background, so it’s possible Tony’s just gotten distracted by whatever is in his hands.

“Yeah Barnes,” he says, sounding only the usual amount of distracted, “what’s up?”

“I’ve…got something I need your help with.” _Shit_ he didn’t think through what he was going to say, knowing it could make him lose his nerve. But now that he’s here he has no idea where to start.

“Animal, vegetable, or mineral?”

“Animal.” Bucky sighs, rubbing his forehead. “It’s uh…hard to explain…”

“No shit,” Tony says, then yells away from the mouth of the phone, “ _Hey! Knock that off you piece of junk—no over_ there, _I said, there!_ ” before he’s back. “Damn Barnes, you manage against the odds to find yourself a woman up there in that frozen wasteland? I’m impressed. What do you need? Bet she hates that claptrap icebox you live in huh? Look I’ll send my contractor up, this guy is great, he—”

“ _Tony_ , jesus, let me get a word in, you asshole!” Bucky barks, annoyance flaring enough to wipe out his uncertainty for the moment. “Look, I don’t need _you_ exactly it’s—it’s more of an Iron Man thing. You’re still working with Shield and your little super gang, right?”

Tony snorts, but some of the background noise of his lab quiets and he seems to focus in on what Bucky is saying.

“I prefer ‘super friends,’ but yeah. Just what kinda trouble you in up there Barnes?”

Bucky sighs. “I found something. Someone. He’s…fuck, Tony I think I found Captain America. Steve Rogers he—he washed up on my fucking beach.”

There’s a pause, and the rest of the clanging stops entirely so that there’s silence on the other end of the line. “Say that again?”

Bucky huffs. “Captain Steve Rogers.” He enunciates carefully. “He crashed that plane into the arctic right? Well, wherever he was the last 70 years, he’s here now. Alive. With me.”

“You pulling my dick here Bucky?”

“I wish.”

“What makes you think it’s him? Some guy shows up and claims he’s Steve Rogers back from the dead, okay, but you’re too smart to take his word for it, right? This isn’t some crazy person working you for an angle—”

“Tony, I’m positive. I’ve—I wasn’t at first and he didn’t remember anything. But I’m sure now. I’ve seen the proof. It’s him.”

“At first?” Tony asks, curiously, latching onto the one thing Bucky doesn’t really care to expound on. “How long he been there?”

“Long enough, Stark,” Bucky says, an edge in his voice warning Tony not to push it—though that’s no guarantee of anything with him. “Look, you know me. I wouldn’t be calling this in to you if I didn’t mean it. I wish to fucking god we weren’t having this conversation. But I’m serious.”

“Okay. You got it Buckaroo.”

“So you’re gonna come…check it out?”

“Yep,” Tony says, easily, and his voice is muffled again as he leans away from the speaker, “ _Jarvis, get my scheduled cleared with Pep for the day, okay? And uh…get me somebody at Shield—not Fury!—I dunno one of the non drama queens? I don’t know how that isn’t specific enough Jarvis! Uh—Hill! Get me her, soon as she can get here._ ”

Bucky listens to the exchange with a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. No going back.

“Tony?” he says, and he tries not to sound too pathetic.

“Yeah?”

“He doesn’t exactly…he’s still sorta remembering everything that happened. Probably wanna bring a shrink or some files or something. He hasn’t exactly gotten the full twenty-first century experience up here with me. He’s probably got some questions.”

“Don’t we all, Dad Jeans, don’t we all.”

“When do you think you’ll get here? And don’t—I mean don’t bring _everyone_ , you’ll freak him out. He’s still trying to—I don’t think he’s ready for the full—”

“Buckyyy,” Tony drawls, his tone shifting in a way that makes Bucky cringe, “am I very much mistaken or is that a little bit of _caring_ I hear in your voice?” Tony muses to himself, “I’m guessing if the serum kept Capsicle alive on the ice he might not have come through his defrosting too bad, huh? In which case what it sounds like is that you’ve had a _very_ handsome super-soldier with perfect bone structure and golden boy manners shacked up with you in your cozy little cabin for a period of time which I now recall you refused to specify, so I have to imagine—”

“Well, stop. Stop imagining. Just get up here Tony. Or send someone, I dunno, better. Send Pepper.”

“In your dreams! My dad only talked about Steve Rogers like he fucking invented America and all things Just and Right, I’m not gonna miss out on potentially welcoming him to this fucked up century.”

“So you’ll be here? Today?”

There’s a muffled sound of Tony muttering. Then, “I will be there in three hours and 15 minutes. Could make it in two forty-five but apparently the beautiful and capable Agent Hill requires the half hour before she can make a flight time, go figure.”

Bucky draws in a shaking breath. “Alright.”

“Later Barnes.”

Tony hangs up without waiting for a reply. Bucky lets the phone drop from his ear and shoves it into the pocket of his robe, his chest gaping hollowly. Three hours.

Steve is awake when Bucky creeps back down the ladder, sitting up in bed with his hands loose in his lap. He looks up as Bucky reappears, face impassive.

“Did you find anything out? About me?” he asks.

Bucky gives a half shrug. “Not really. But someone’s going to come soon. Somebody who can tell you everything.”

“How long?”

“Three hours, give or take.”

Steve nods, slowly, his jaw set. “Okay. I’m ready.”

Bucky wants to say _I’m not_ , but he doesn’t think that would help either of them. It’s time for them both to pretend that this is okay, because it’s what has to happen.

Instead he says, “I’ll make you breakfast.”

Bucky sends Steve to wake Alice up, suspecting that he’ll want a little bit of time with her before…before. And he sets himself to making an elaborate breakfast, going into the freezer in the basement to pull the items he doesn’t already have in the fridge. He decides to make eggs benedict, because it’s the fanciest breakfast thing he knows how to do. It was his “meal to impress a date the morning after” recipe once upon a time. Bucky hopes the extra effort says at least a little bit of what he wants Steve to understand.

Steve brings Alice down as Bucky is whipping the hollandaise and Bucky suppresses a smile seeing that Steve’s dressed her up in her most ridiculous sweater—the one with the long bunny ears on the hood—over rainbow leggings and a sparkly pink tutu skirt.

“We wanted to look a little special today,” Steve says, sitting at the table with Alice in his lap, and bouncing her on his knee so that she chuckles around the fingers in her mouth.

“Well, that’s never a bad thing,” Bucky replies.

They eat. Steve washes the dishes. They lean side by side on the back of the living room couch and blow bubbles for Alice, who chases them, shrieking.

Before they can really blink, the hours are gone, and a low, insistent hum begins, somewhere in the distance.

Steve hears it before Bucky, his hand shooting out to grasp Bucky’s wrist, his head snapping around. Before Bucky can do more than raise his eyebrows, bubble wand in his other hand paused halfway to his lips, he hears it, too.

“Bucky,” Steve says, bringing Bucky’s hand to his mouth and pressing his lips to the knuckles, eyes screwed shut.

Bucky sets down the bubbles, and wraps his free hand to join his other, grasping Steve’s between them.

“I could stay, I don’t have to go I could just—stay.” Steve says in a rush, clinging to his hand.

“I would let you in a heartbeat, if you really meant it. If you could. But we both know…”

“I know,” Steve says, hanging his head.

“You thought you died, Steve, saving the world. Don’t you deserve to see it? See what you sacrificed for?”

“I know.”

“I want you to understand who you are—know that I’m not the only one who thinks you’re good enough, that you’re a hero—”

“I love you.” Steve cuts him off.

Bucky stares back at him, mouth open slightly over whatever words he was going to say that have now died on his lips.

But outside the hum has turned into the roar of a helicopter propeller, blowing icy sprays of snow against the windows of the little house.

Steve drops his hand, turning to the window. “It’s time, I guess.”

He stands, heading toward the front door and Bucky scrambles to follow, scooping up Alice from where she’s sat herself down on the living room rug, looking between them interestedly.

Steve doesn’t bother with any kind of coat, so Bucky takes just enough time to shuffle Alice into her snowsuit in the mudroom as Steve waits, face stern and distant. Bucky finishes up her zippers and props her on his hip, turning to Steve.

Steve takes his hand one more time, giving it a final squeeze. Then he drops it, turning for the handle of the door.

Bucky follows after him and the cold air that hits him is bracing but not overwhelming. He thinks it must be up above freezing today even and his sweater and lined jeans are enough for the moment, though his breath still puffs out white before him.

The helicopter blades slow with a whumping sound and a woman in a black coat climbs out. Bucky hurries to stand beside Steve, who comes to a halt, clasping his hands in front of himself at his belt. Even though he’s just wearing jeans and Bucky’s slouchy grey sweater, he looks commanding. He looks like who he is.

Bucky barely has time to think to himself that this will be Agent Hill of Shield when he’s distracted by a blazing shower of light as a red and gold shape streaks over the top of the helicopter, coming to land several yards away. Bucky heaves a deep sigh. Apparently Tony couldn’t resist a little bit of a show. _He couldn’t just ride on the fucking helicopter?_ Bucky chances a sideways glance at Steve for his reaction. His eyes widen a little, but he’s otherwise unfazed.

Tony’s suit snaps open and dismantles around him, first the visor and then the rest so the man himself can step down from it, arms spread wide and magnanimous.

“Bucky Barnes, you old boot!” he says, jovially as he advances. “And my goddaughter, future tech genius! Bet on it Barnes, she’s got the genes—”

“Tony, she’s _not_ your goddaughter, we aren’t even Catholic—”

“Self-appointed—and hey! I could be Catholic? Right? I do love guilt/gilt of both the gold and personal varieties so—” he doesn’t even bother to finish the thought before he redirects, eyes landing on Steve. “And this must be your iceman.”

“Stark,” Steve says with a terse nod.

“The one and only.” Tony agrees. “Well, have been since my pop died, which for me is a while, but I understand feels a bit more fresh for you.”

Steve takes a deep breath in through his nostrils and Bucky opens his mouth to say something to shut Tony up when they’re all saved by Agent Hill catching up to him.

“Tony,” she says, “shut up. What did we talk about?”

“Ah right,” Tony says with a grin, then adds incongruously to Steve, “this won’t hurt a bit.”

Before either of them can guess what he means, Tony raises his phone, shooting a blue beam that scans up and down Steve’s face. He pulls it away again just as quickly, tapping a few things over the screen.

“Right on the money,” Tony says to Hill after a beat.

She turns to Steve with a cool, professional smile and extends her hand. “In that case, Captain Rogers. It’s good to meet you.”

Steve shakes it politely, though a frown creases his brow. “A pleasure, Ma’am.”

“God, listen to you!” Tony says with mock-disgust. “You’re even worse than I imagined. I love it. I can’t wait to pick apart your brain once we, you know, make sure it’s working properly.” He claps his hands and rubs them together. “Alrighty, well, I’m freezing my balls off here so, shall we?”

Agent Hill endears herself to Bucky by rolling her eyes and shifting her stance slightly to put herself between Steve and Tony, touching his arm softly.

“I won’t let him badger you too much,” she says to Steve. “We’re headed back to New York first so we can start you with medical and debriefing, but I know you must have a lot of questions. I’m going to do my best to answer all of them.”

“Thank you, Ma’am.” Steve says, nodding.

“So? Let’s get cooking! Places to go, people to see,” Tony grouses. “Buckaroo, I assume that this small person’s lack of appropriate attire and your missing baggage means you will not be joining us?”

“Tony, you know—”

“More’s the pity for me,” Tony says, clapping him on the shoulder so hard that Bucky starts, “but you let me know the second you change your mind. Cap, let’s roll out.”

With that he turns on his heel, marching toward the open door of the helicopter. Agent Hill moves to follow him at a more sedate pace, looking back over her shoulder with her eyebrows raised mildly at Steve.

Steve leans in faster than Bucky can track and places a kiss on Alice’s forehead.

“Goodbye.” He grips Bucky’s shoulder all too briefly.

“Goodbye,” Bucky says. The word comes out faint and it’s spoken to Steve’s back as he walks to the helicopter, long strides closing the distance in a blink.

Bucky watches the door to the thing close. Then he shakes himself and turns to flee, only managing to not quite run from the field toward the house as he goes. He tells himself it’s to avoid the spatter of snow and slush when the thing’s propeller starts up again.

Really it’s because Bucky’s suddenly sure he’s going to cry. And he doesn’t want a teary face to be the last thing Steve sees as he flies away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from Sara Bareilles' Islands. 
> 
>  
> 
> _I’m ready for the sea change_  
>  Helpless felt this coming from a mile away  
> And now you’re looking at me babe,  
> And how we’ll separate if we can  
> 'Cause I still count on one hand  
> The number of good men I know


	4. A Life Left on the Shore

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello friends! Here I am to fix what I did to you when we left off yesterday. Today also we have ART so please visit back to the top notes to see what my awesome artists have made for this! 
> 
> Also if you are interested here's the playlist of all the songs referenced in this fic to really capture the mood! 
> 
> Final chapter and an epilogue coming at you.

Time is a funny thing.

It’s funny to Steve how the hours with Bucky passed so quickly, never enough, when the minutes now pass at such an agonizingly slow pace. Funny how he could go to sleep in the ice and seven decades could pass him by and he doesn’t even remember a moment of it. He feels like he should have dreamed, or had some awareness of being in darkness— _something_ —but there’s nothing. No sense of the time moving on around him.

It’s hard to wrap his mind around it. Hill, Coulson, the others all look at him sympathetically and tell him he’ll catch up soon, that the technology and new things of this century won’t stay confusing for long. Steve nods and doesn’t correct them. He doesn’t care about the tech; none of it is that alarming to him.

It seems like Shield and the rest of the Avenger organization have all forgotten that the reason he’s even here is thanks to science so advanced still nobody has ever replicated it. Steve got used to going with the flow of the advances of modern technology a long time ago—phones you can carry in your pocket aren’t the thing that’s going to send him into a breakdown.

Of course that’s really the root of the problem—the 1940’s, Steve’s lifetime, seem like ancient history to these people. He’s pretty sure he could tell them he’s scared of the cars on the street because they go without being cranked and at least 80% of them would absolutely believe it. For whatever reason, no one seems to have any perspective on how near or far the events of his past really are to the present. And Steve’s perspective on that might be screwy in its own way since it literally feels like just months ago—but he privately feels that his is closer to the truth. Things haven’t changed as much as everybody seems to think when they glance at him sideways to check for his reaction to dumb stuff like Tony ordering a pizza over a computer.

The only one who doesn’t seem to expect Steve to run shrieking at the sight of a laptop is Dr. Banner, who invites Steve to his lab in his quiet way, asking only for Steve to let him know if there’s anything he’d like to have explained before going about his work.

He thinks about Bucky’s computer and his emails and his music playing device and how it never fazed, but just intrigued him, although he understands now that his unfamiliarity was more than amnesia.

Really, for all their histrionics, Steve feels like the answer to his question, “What has happened while I was gone?” is pretty simple: won the war, started some new ones, alien invasion, super heroes saved the planet, the planet doesn’t much care, repeat.

He gets the pitch to join back up laid on thick. Steve tells Coulson he needs to think about it more before making a decision. On the one hand, he’s not sure what the point would be. They’ve managed without him for this long. On the other, he’s not sure what else he’s fit for.

Something his mother used so say comes back to him more and more: _the days are long, but the years are brief_. Turns out she was righter than she knew. He visits their old apartment building in Brooklyn and finds that it’s been converted into trendy retail space. Steve doesn’t feel anything standing in front of it; it’s too different from the one in his mind’s eye.

But the deli on the corner is exactly the same, down to the man behind the counter who must be the son of the one in Steve’s mind—but he’d never be able to tell. Steve buys a pastrami sandwich on rye and when he closes his eyes in the back booth, he can imagine he never left.

Memory is a funny thing, too.

Certain things come back to him the moment he sees them in the files that Shield provides on a flat little computer screen to read in his sterile new quarters. The door in his mind that he’d felt unlock swings open easily and when he reaches for memories he finds them at once, as if they’d been there the whole time without interruption.

The Howlers jump off the page before him, living and whole and immediate, as if they’d just been waiting for him to turn around and say hello.

Other things remain obscured slightly, even when he reads about them. Steve thinks maybe those are the things that his mind has chosen to blur anyway, unrelated to his time in the ice. He can’t precisely remember some of the battles, the things they say he did. Maybe he doesn’t want to, or maybe his own legend has grown larger over time just like anything else and they didn’t even happen. It’s hard to guess.

He does remember Azzano, when he’d stormed the Hydra base holding captives from the 107th—his father’s old unit, the one he’d been desperate to join up and serve with.

And he remembers what he couldn’t quite before—not his father, who’d died before he had anything to remember about him, but the myth of him, repeated often by his mother in low, soothing tones. Of the hero he’d been, how much love he left with Steve even after he was gone, the man he’d been and hoped Steve would become. It makes him think of Alice, wondering what the story will be that Bucky tells her about her mother, if she’ll stitch together every shred she can glean and live with it burned into her bones.

But he stops himself from thinking about that. It hurts too much.

Because grief—grief is a funny, terrible thing.

Actually, it’s many funny, terrible things at once.

There’s the grief for his mother and father, old and worn in over time like a comfortable pair of jeans. That loss isn’t gone just because there are newer ones to wear—it sits deep underneath them still like the whisper of waves on a distant shore.

Then there’s the grief that comes to him as he reads the files of his friends—the first pages sparking memories of their laughing faces, their bloodied knuckles, their bravery and camaraderie. But the pages keep going, telling him the stories of their lives that continued without him. And that ended without him, too. Steve is happy seeing photos of their wedding days, their grandchildren, the medals they received as they continued to do good and brave things in his absence. He bends his head and prays over copies of their obituaries. He’s late and he doesn’t know if it even means anything—but it’s something he used to do, he remembers. And it’s all he _can_ do, now.

He runs around his mind chasing it in circles. They didn’t die too soon or with any tragedy, they lived full lives, all of them. It just doesn’t feel that way to him when their smiling, youthful faces are the ones that he saw weeks ago. This grief is new, sharp and uncomfortable under his breastbone. At the same time, it was something they all prepared themselves for, carrying the possibility of losing each other at any moment all through the war. He can be glad it wasn’t to Hydra weapons even if it stings the same.

Then there’s the other grief, the one which nobody else knows about. The one that isn’t worn in and that he wasn’t prepared for.

It’s ironic, really, how much time Shield’s team of therapists and Agents Hill and Coulson have put into helping him transition as softly as possible into this new century where everyone he knows is dead. Into planning for how he will cope with the loss. But he _did_ have someone in this century—the person to whom his mind strays with distracting frequency. Bucky and Alice and their snug lighthouse are less than a three hour plane ride away. But the time they had together might as well be centuries ago and the distance light years for all that it makes their loss any easier than the rest.

Nobody knows to ask Steve how he’s adjusting to life without Bucky and Alice. So he doesn’t tell them—with one exception.

Peggy Carter, the one incongruent piece of Steve’s new world leftover from the old, is as beautiful as she ever was, even with her age hovering at a triple digit.

“Tell me about him. The man who pulled you out of the water,” she says to him on the third or fourth afternoon he’s spent sitting beside her, avoiding Shield and Stark and everyone else.

They’re sitting outside on the sloping lawn of the well-kept care-home where she lives, Peggy propped up in a lounge chair surrounded by pillows. She’s clearly a favorite, as every half hour or so some orderly or nurse stops by to fluff the pillows, tuck her blankets in tighter against what is admittedly a mild spring day, and offer them lemonade. Steve laughs and ducks his head as Peggy by turns teases and compliments each of them, her dark eyes sparkling with mirth.

If Steve stays late enough into the afternoon, he knows he’ll bear witness to the ravage the years have visited on her as she starts to fade a little in her mind, confused and upset to see him here and unchanged. For now it’s early in the day and her wits are about her, sharp as she ever was.

Sharp enough to prod at the thing that Steve has been holding onto tightest. He sighs.

“What do you mean?”

“Oh Steve,” Peggy says, fondly exasperated, “you aren’t going to make me fight it out of you are you? I can tell there’s more about your miraculous rescue than you’ve let on.”

“I’d like to see you fight me, Carter. Guessing you’ve learned some new tricks since you last shot me.”

“Shot _at_ you, Steve. Honestly, as if you don’t know the difference. And yes I’m quite sure I could manage you if I needed to, but instead I’m just going to command you to indulge your elders—age before beauty and all that.”

“Not fair Peg, when you’ve still got both of ’em on me.”

Peggy cackles, smacking his shoulder with the back of her hand. “And when did Steve Rogers learn to flirt? Devil. But you’re deflecting again. Come on, out with it.”

Steve gives her a wry, sideways smirk, and takes a sip of his lemonade. “You can’t give me orders.” 

“The hell I can’t,” Peggy replies gamely, echoing their long ago exchange. “You’re still only a Captain and I’ve been promoted a few times since then if you haven’t heard. I’d be your boss about six times over now.”

“Ah well, can’t blame a guy for trying,” Steve says with a small smile.

“And so?” Peggy prompts again, raising her eyebrows expectantly.

Steve fidgets with the glass in his hand, but can’t help being pinned down by her direct gaze, unable to refuse her anything. “I—I came out of it about two months ago now.”

Peggy gives an encouraging _mm-hmm_.

“I…I washed up on the beach, I guess. Hill tells me they’ve got some theories about tides and the flow of the ice pack or something. Makes sense I guess. All I know is I woke up in a house dry and warm, but I didn’t remember anything. Got snowed in with the guy who saved me and then when I still didn’t…couldn’t remember who I was, Bucky offered to let me stay ’til I did.”

“And Bucky was…kind?”

Steve swallows. “Yeah he was. He is.”

“And he has a daughter, too?”

“Yeah. Alice. About a year and a half old.”

Peggy gives a soft chuckle. “You always did love babies. Even when you got the serum and you were afraid of holding them after the change. Afraid you’d break them.”

Steve snorts. “Yeah until about 200 moms across America broke me back in on that USO tour shoving them into my arms, so I had to figure it out.”

Peggy laughs, “Exactly! Do you remember that time in Austria—we cleared that base—?”

“—and the whole town showed up to throw us a parade when we tried to leave?”

“All the other Howlers kissed their whole way through, every farmer’s daughter and resistance runner who came up to offer their thanks,” Peggy says with a laugh, her eyes growing distant, “except you—you talked to every kid we passed and by the time we reached the end of Main Street you had a baby on both hips and all the ones big enough to walk trailing you like ducklings.”

Steve chuckles. “Yeah…yeah I remember.” He resists adding, _like it was yesterday_.

“So what else?”

Steve fumbles for what exactly to say. “He—it was good there, Peg. I was happy. For a little bit.” He adds, not sure quite what makes him say it, “He taught me how to dance.”

There’s a long pause and Steve glances out of the corner of his eye to see Peggy’s lips pressed in a tight line, thinking.

“Steve,” she begins, slowly, “did you love him?”

Steve’s head snaps down, eyes suddenly very intent on the condensation on his glass.

“I don’t mean to—” Peggy stops, then begins again. “Things are different now, you know. It doesn’t have to be a secret, if you did.”

“I know,” Steve says wearily.

He has, in fact, been informed of that element of the passing years—by some Shield agent tasked with bringing him up to speed on current events one of his first days, who had told him about the legalization of gay marriage with a nervous, darting glance like he might object. Steve had reassured the kid with a suppressed grin and she’d looked relieved to find that he wasn’t going to go into some bigoted rant against the sins of homosexuality. He supposes it was a fair fear for her to have, but god—if only she knew.

He’d thought about how they’d said goodbye, how he hadn’t leaned in to kiss Bucky one last time because of Maria and Tony. Keeping Bucky safe from prying eyes out of instinct, though it hadn’t been necessary. Steve hopes Bucky understands and didn’t think…well. Whatever he might think now.

“So, I take that to mean then that your current self-imposed tragedy isn’t due to you thinking you haven’t got a choice in your romantic expressions then.”

Steve shakes his head mutely.

“Did he not…return the sentiment?”

Steve shakes his head again, feeling a blush rise on his neck and cheeks.

“Ah, indeed.” Peggy says thoughtfully. “What then?”

“Peggy, do you think…” Steve says, not answering her question. “Do you think you would’ve married me? If we coulda?”

“Of course,” she says, softly, reaching out to take one of his large hands in her slender worn ones.

“Did you think about it?”

She sighs. “Every day for a long time.” She pauses. “And then a little at a time I thought of it less, day by day. I moved on. I fell in love again and I married, I kept living because that’s all you can do.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I don’t say that to hurt you Steve I say it because—look, for a long time my only regret in living my life was that you didn’t get to live yours. But now you’re here and you don’t deserve the chance to live it now any less for the delay. Do you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I missed out on the chance I was supposed to have, you know?” 

Then he yelps, hand going to the back of his head where Peggy has just given it a good smack. She points a crooked finger at him and glares fiercely.

“Don’t you _dare_ , Steven Grant Rogers. Are you suggesting that my marriage was a sham because the one we might have wanted didn’t happen?”

“ _No!_ That’s not—”

“I _know_ it’s not what you meant. So if it was true for me, then why isn’t it true for yourself now? So dramatic. Your logic is deeply flawed. Why won’t you let yourself have the life you want now? Let me give you the benefit of my age and the fact that I was married for almost 50 years—it was worth it.”

Steve rubs the back of his neck, flustered. “It’s not—I’m still—I promised Erskine when he gave me the serum that I’d—”

“You made a promise to Erskine _75 years ago_ and you don’t think you’ve already paid that debt?” Peggy asks, incredulous.

“I was given something not everybody gets. Means I owe it to the world to—”

“You gave your _life_ , Steve! Just because you got another shot at it—don’t you think there must be a limit on how many times a person can be a martyr, for goodness’ sake? It’s practically—practically—” she grasps for the right word to express her meaning, “ _blasphemous_. That’s what it is. Like thinking you deserve to be better than every Saint in the canon who could only die once. What would your lovely Catholic mother say?”

Steve can’t help a surprised bark of laughter at that and Peggy’s face relents into a chuckle of her own.

“And what did your gentleman…Bucky, say about it?”

“He didn’t. He just said I deserved to see the world since I sacrificed to save it. To see what I’d sacrificed for.”

“And have you?”

“Yeah, I guess I have.”

“So you’ll have noticed then that it’s spinning just the same and entirely without your aid. You saved it, now others continue to keep up the good work. Your services are unneeded—retire and rest on your laurels like the rest of us. You know they call us the greatest generation, don’t you?”

“Not how Fury tells it. He says they need me on the team—”

Peggy lets out a totally unladylike snort. “Fury is possibly the only man I’ve met who’s more dramatic than you. Well, maybe excepting Howard’s spawn—he got Howard’s flair didn’t he? Anyway,” she continues, “he’s buttering you up because he’s a large child with a lavish and excessive collection of toys he’d like to add you to. But let me assure you the ones he has already are perfectly capable of handling things without you, whatever he says.”

“So what are you telling me to do then?” Steve asks, genuinely hoping to be enlightened by her answer.

She considers a moment. “What do you want to do?”

“I’m not…not sure.”

“Well then,” Peggy says, patting his hand comfortably and lying back against her mountain of pillows. “I’m telling you to get the hell out of here and find out.”

*

Steve _does_ think about it in the coming days. He tries to anyway. He tries to try.

It’s just that asking himself what he _wants_ doesn’t come easily to Steve. He honest to god can’t remember the last time he really did. Probably it was sitting in an enlistment center praying to be allowed to go fight. Then after the serum, when he felt like he’d been given more than he had ever imagined asking for, all he’d been concerned with was what he _could_ do. How he could help.

So he makes an effort to spend a little more time at the Avengers tower, where Tony has invited him to live with the other Avengers if he decides to join the team (though Tony always says _when_ not _if_ ). Steve isn’t sure he can picture himself here, in the common room with Natasha or Tony or Clint. He feels stiff and awkward most of the time, like his heart isn’t in it. Which it isn’t—his heart is somewhere on a cold northern coast, with two sets of curly-brown hair and crinkly-eyed laughs.

“Why do you do it?” he asks Bruce one afternoon, leaning his elbows on Bruce’s large workstation in his lab, watching the man tinker with something in a series of test tubes.

“Mmm,” Bruce says on a sigh, looking at something far beyond Steve’s shoulder. “Well,” he starts slowly, “guess I do it because the Other Guy is part of me no matter where I go. So I might as well be around people who don’t look at me and see him all the time. This is the one place I can be a person, because nobody’s too worried about the fact that I’m also something else.” He shrugs. “Got family here, guess is what it comes down to. Worth sticking around through a few fights for that.”

Bruce doesn’t ask Steve why he wants to know. Steve figures everybody knows he’s still deciding on his place. He likes that Bruce answers truthfully for himself without a sales pitch at the end, or even any opinion on what Steve should do.

One day, his shield appears in the living room of his agency apartment. Steve sits with it in his lap, hands running over the surface of it, remembering its weight and heft. He sets it down, but not too far. Some things are muscle memory too deep to forget.

Clint Barton and Tony both just talk like it’s a foregone conclusion that he’ll join them, though Steve can’t bring himself to be annoyed by it, since they do it so congenially. Like they’re all already friends. He thinks about what Bruce said about finding his family here, the only people who can accept him as he is. Steve’s just not sure this _is_ the only place for him to find that. But he doesn’t know.

Natasha doesn’t ever say much to him, but Steve catches her watching him sometimes with a close, knowing smile on her lips. He doesn’t have any idea what that means.

Pepper Potts, Tony’s wife and much better half (as Tony himself introduced her) is possibly Steve’s favorite person apart from Bruce. She reminds him of Peggy a little, as well as all of the other beautiful, capable women he’d known once upon a time and been utterly terrified by.

He’s tempted when he meets her to fall back into his old standby of just not saying anything at all. The instinct is still strong in him to go silent when confronted by a strikingly glamorous woman in bright lipstick and this one also happens to run all of Stark Industries.

But Pepper doesn’t allow him to grow awkward, pulling him immediately into a warm hug and asking if Tony has been letting him alone. The meeting is ostensibly to discuss Steve’s plans and a press strategy now that his rediscovery has been made public. Mostly, Pepper makes him drink tea and does a better job getting out of him how he feels in the new century than either of his two Shield therapists have managed. She sends him away with a kiss on the cheek and instructions to come to her if he needs anything he doesn’t want to have to jump through the “asinine Shield hoops or my husband’s bullshit” to get. Pepper doesn’t weigh in on what she expects him to do.

Ultimately, it’s Nick Fury who helps him make up his mind—though not in the way the man had intended.

Steve always has been a stubborn, contrary son of a bitch.

He’s at the Avenger’s tower when it happens, sketching absently, tucked into a corner of the large sectional sofa while Clint and Tony argue about something to do with the coffee machine in the open kitchen. He figures that just being here counts as spending time with other people, even if he isn’t necessarily interacting. He’s about to try talking himself into joining the conversation when an alarm sounds through the room, Tony’s disembodied computer butler speaking over the noise.

“ _Sorry to bother, Sir, but there seems to be a situation requiring the attention of all available team members at your earliest possible convenience._ ”

“What’re we looking at Jarvis?” Tony asks, as Clint slips away out of the kitchen toward the door leading to the other levels of the tower.

“ _Unclear, Sir, but there were several explosions off the coast near Atlantic City and there appears to be a rather large sort of portal open in the sky above them. Again._ ”

Tony sighs theatrically, but doesn’t seem too put out about it. “Shield looked in on it?”

“ _Director Fury will be here for further consultation in approximately three minutes, on his way up now._ ”

“Good, good. Send me up a suit, huh? Mach…18, I think. Thanks Jarv.”

Fury blusters into the room shortly after, his black coat swinging behind him.

“It’s a bad one, Tony. Got three Navy ships that were doing exercises down off the coast and most of the city in chaos. Looks like aliens, not very smart but a hell of a lot of ’em. Need all the man power you’ve got up here.”

Tony nods, turning to Steve. “How ’bout it, Cap? You ready to suit up and dig in?”

Steve half rises, hesitating, though he knows of course his answer will always be yes when he’s needed.

Fury cuts in before he can respond. “Ah—sorry Tony, I need all readily available _official_ manpower. Captain Rogers is still civilian status ’til he lets us know otherwise. Even then it’s gonna take some paperwork.” Fury fixes a baleful eye on Steve, who can feel heat rising in his cheeks. “More paperwork than I got time for right now. He’s gonna have to watch this fight on TV just like everybody else.”

Tony shrugs, “Too bad, Capsicle. Catch you next time.”

He strides to the large window, the glass of which has slid aside to leave it open to the air as gold and red metal fall into place around him. Then he’s gone, a shooting burst of light streaking across the sky.

“Sorry about this, Captain. You know how much I’d like to have you on the team in the future. Fights like this, could us your expertise.”

Steve gives Fury a tight smile. “I understand, Sir.”

And he does. He knows just what Fury is doing by forcing him to stay here, watch the other _sanctioned_ Avengers fight from the safety of this room when he should be out there with him. Fury’s both punishing and goading him so that the next one that comes around, he’ll already have said yes.

Fury returns the smile, seeing Steve’s comprehension. “’Til next time then,” he says and exits the room in a swirl of black leather.

Steve sinks back down onto the couch, though not quite all the way, hands clenched white knuckled tight in his lap. Steve does _not_ like being _handled_.

“Jarvis, will you show me the fight?” he asks to the air, hoping the computer hears him. He’s still not exactly clear on how or where Jarvis operates, but he usually seems to be listening and available from just about anywhere in the tower.

“ _Compiling feed from the site of the disturbance now, Captain._ ”

Images flash up around Steve, different angles of the chaos both on land and over the water. Before long, the Avengers begin to show up and enter the fray. He can tell immediately which view is Tony’s, flitting around agilely above the scene, as well as Clint’s, which is stationary and perched high somewhere with a view of a huge swath of the fighting.

Steve’s fingers itch as he watches each of them encounter and engage with the stream of odd, bearlike bodies of the aliens pouring up from the shore. Some go down with Clint’s arrows embedded in them. Others are knocked aside by blasts from Tony’s suit. Soon enough the Hulk tears through one of the video feeds, barreling straight into the waves toward the source of the attack, roaring.

He finds his eyes following Natasha the most closely. Partially it’s from worry—as far as Steve knows Natasha doesn’t have any super healing and he’s most afraid that she or Clint will be injured while he sits here helplessly watching to satisfy Nick Fury’s power play. As she continues to work her way through body after body, leaving a trail behind her with only the collateral damage of a few landed hits to herself, he keeps watching for a different reason. She fights beautifully and her style is probably the most similar to his own out of everyone on the beach. Steve realizes that he’s subconsciously taking notes when she uses a particularly clever hand-to-hand maneuver that he thinks he could use and scoffing inwardly when her opponents attempt something obvious and stupid to take her down.

Thinking about how he would have approached this fight, what changes in tactics he might have made if he were the one in charge of the defense, all of it distracts him for several long minutes. There’s a small piece of his brain that’s detached enough to be annoyed at himself thinking, _This is exactly what Fury meant for you to feel_. Part of him does give in to the wish he were there, fists flying and thoughts quiet as they always were during a battle when the enemy was clear and he just had to _fight_.

But as he’s struggling with the opposing feelings, a realization dawns on him. Steve frowns, eyes scanning across the different feeds Jarvis pulled up for him.

While he was busy thinking about how he’d do things, the team had steadily been _winning_. Already. The alien bodies are thinning out around them, receding back into the portal, around which Tony flies, scanning it with blue beams.

Steve sinks back down to the sofa, out of the anxious half-crouch he’s been holding like he could jump in to the rescue if he needed to.

A slow smile starts to creep over his face as he watches the Avengers clear out the rest of the threat with an efficiency and coordination born of long days spent on the battlefield together, of trust and competency. Peggy was right. They didn’t _need_ him.

And Steve? Steve isn’t sure that he minds.

*

Steve lies in bed awake that night, staring at the ceiling.

There’s an undeniable part of him that longed to jump into the mix today, wanted the straightforward comfort of an enemy and a fight and his fists.

The bigger part is wondering what would happen right now if he somehow got on a flight back to Labrador and showed up on Bucky’s front step.

Would Bucky be glad to see him back? Take him into his arms? Hand him Alice like nothing had changed and go to cook dinner?

Or had Bucky meant, when he said he wanted Steve to understand that the world still saw him as a hero, that he expected him to go back to being one? Would he be disappointed that even after Steve remembered everything he’d done and could do, all he really wanted was to stay put?

Maybe Bucky’s had the time to think better of everything that happened between them. They’d been in such a close, surreal little world together. But it’s different looking at it in the light of day, isn’t it? Or the light of reality. Bucky had a whole life before Steve had crashed into it. Maybe he’d even been a little relieved to settle back into it once he was gone. Bucky hadn’t said _I love you_ back. It isn’t like Steve really gave him the time to, but still.

Steve could call him. Tony gave Steve Bucky’s phone number the second day he was here and it’s still tucked carefully in the drawer beside his bed. But what would he say? And Bucky hasn’t reached out either.

He’s got to figure out what he’s doing with himself before he can drag Bucky back into any of it. If Steve just calls to say _I miss you_ , or _I meant it and still mean it that I love you_ , without anything else to offer—Bucky would be well justified in responding _so what? What now?_

Steve turns over on his stomach with a huff, punching the lumpy pillow into shape under his head.

_What do you want, Steve?_

He wants to be a good man. He wants to live a good life now that he’s got a second shot at it. And when Steve thinks about the best, most truly good things he’s encountered in this new century all of them reside in a little lighthouse surrounded by snow and sea.

For the first time in his life it occurs to him that it’s possible that doing the right thing might also be doing exactly what he wants. That a man can do what’s right living quietly with love as well as he can do it by fighting. That maybe being good enough for one person, or two people, is more important than being good enough for the whole world.

_So what are you gonna do about it?_

Steve rolls out of bed, giving up on sleep to go for a run as the steely grey of pre-dawn begins to caress New York City.

*

Fury is unapologetically livid when Steve informs him that his gambit has in fact had the exact opposite effect he’d intended. Even if Steve is still uncertain in many ways about his decision, getting to tell Fury that his tactic failed does sweeten the experience.

The Avengers have varying reactions from bummed to indifferent, though all of them express it more magnanimously than the Shield Director.

Tony, as always, is the most vocal about his feelings.

“Come on, Cap! You really going to appear miraculously from the great wide yonder for the world to see just to disappear into it again? People will be crushed! _And_ their grandpas, too!”

“You don’t need me, Tony.” Steve says patiently. “I’m not gonna fight just because I can’t think of anything else to do. Wouldn’t be right.”

Tony huffs. “At least let me set you up with Pepper, do some press or something!”

Steve shakes his head, “What for? Nobody really cares what I do.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, gramps,” Tony says, clapping a hand on Steve’s shoulder. “All the geezers and their sons like me who grew up with them never shutting up about you care. Gotta throw the people some kinda bone here, even if you’re abandoning America the beautiful to my admittedly talented and capable hands.”

“I’ll think about it,” Steve says, without any intention of doing so.

*

Unfortunately, it’s Pepper who contacts him directly next and Steve can’t bring himself to brush her off like he can Tony.

“Okay, so, tell me what’s up.” Pepper hands Steve a cup of tea from the tray her assistant just brought in across her spotlessly clean desk.

“Nothing is up,” Steve says stubbornly, cradling the delicate teacup in his hands and sniffing down at the curl of steam that rises off of it. “Peppermint? Really? Is that on purpose or…?”

Pepper suppresses a smile and scoffs laughingly. “You think I make my tea selections on a pun basis?” Steve raises an eyebrow. “Well I do, thank you for noticing.”

Steve takes a sip of his tea, and when he looks up again Pepper’s eyes are still fixed on him, eyebrows raised. He sighs.

“I’m not joining up is all. Think it’s better I stay retired and keep myself out of it.”

“Okay,” Pepper replies evenly. “Well, nobody who matters is going to begrudge you that.”

Steve snorts, and Pepper amends gracefully, “They won’t begrudge you forever, anyway. Once they get used to it. Nobody can say you haven’t earned it.”

“So, what am I here for? I kinda got the impression Tony thought you might be able to talk me out of it after he failed.”

Pepper laughs, an infectious sound that scrunches her nose. “I won’t tell you you’re wrong, but just because that’s what Tony hopes for doesn’t mean that’s what I’m going to do.”

“So what then?”

Pepper levels her gaze at him again, still smiling. “I’m happy that you’re staying out of it, Steve. I wish I could get Tony to retire from it all the way.” She shrugs. “But he’s not wrong about the fact that people _do_ care about what you’re doing. If you’re still dead set against a full press offensive—” Steve makes a displeased noise in the back of his throat and Pepper raises a placating hand before he can begin to protest, “that’s _fine_ , is what I was going to say. But I’d really, really recommend you at the very least give me one press conference—you don’t even have to take questions, we can prepare a statement beforehand—just _some_ way for the public to have closure on your story.”

Steve twists his face in distaste and Pepper gets a sly look, adding, “You know, everyone is going to be a lot more willing to leave you alone afterward if you don’t vanish mysteriously again. Once you’re gone from under my protective wing you might be glad not to have reporters tracking you down to ask what you’re doing with yourself every other day.”

Steve groans, slumping back in his chair. Pepper grins, knowing she’s won.

“No questions?” Steve asks.

“No questions. We’ll work up a statement with enough information to satisfy everybody and get them off your back, and that’s it.”

“When?”

Pepper shrugs. “As soon as you want. Actually—scratch that, as soon as I can track down an appropriate uniform. I think you should be in uniform for this—we’re trading in nostalgia, reminding everyone why you deserve to do what you want.”

Steve considers, a thought occurring to him. “And um…you think people will actually watch? Will it be—be on TV and everything?”

Pepper eyes him. “It’ll be big news I think and we’ll time it for a good news cycle. Why?”

He looks away, but he knows he’s blushing. “Just wondering if—who’s gonna see it.”

“Steve,” Pepper says, and her tone makes him wince, pretty sure he knows what’s coming. “Does this—all of this—have anything to do with a certain former Stark engineer? Are you worried what he’ll think of you?”

Steve gives her a doleful, put-upon look. Pepper laughs again.

“I’ve seen his photo, Steve.” She pauses. “And Tony mentioned that he seemed a bit _pressed_ when he called to let us know you were there.”

“Pressed?” Steve asks, dryly, though his heart is suddenly racing. “Is that the word Tony used to describe it?”

“No. Actually, I think Tony’s exact words were that he sounded ‘fucked up about it,’ so take that as you will.”

Steve tries to keep his breathing even, thinking back to that morning when he’d woken to the muffled sound of Bucky’s voice drifting down the tower steps and he’d known that their time was ending. _Bucky was fucked up over it?_ They’d tried so hard for normal that morning, before Steve left, hard enough that he’d wondered if Bucky really felt as decidedly _not_ okay as he did. He’d hoped but—it’s different, hearing it from someone as disinterested in the result of it as Tony.

“I just uh—” Steve says, rubbing the back of his neck. “I just was wondering if maybe he’d see it is all. When it’s on the TV.”

Pepper stares at him for another long moment, and Steve blushes harder under her gaze.

“Well,” she says at last, releasing his eyes as she reaches for a pen and paper, “we’ll do what we can to make sure he does. Now,” she looks up again, all business, “what do you want this statement to communicate—to the world and whoever might be interested in your plans?”

 

Steve does have a plan—he is, after all, the Man with the Plan even if he’s no longer quite so Star Spangled.

He’s going to do Pepper’s press conference (he refuses to think at all about standing in front of a roomful of reporters and being broadcast across the whole world; he’s not going to think about it until he’s walking up to the podium and maybe not even then). He’ll do the conference and it will be the last time Captain America takes the stage, and he’ll breathe a sigh of relief after. Even back in his USO days when he’d gotten used to the spotlight on him he’d never actually grown to enjoy it, just gotten better at faking. The sense of impending relief he anticipates in laying down that piece of his public persona only serves to strengthen his resolve about all the rest.

The statement is simple and to the point. It offers gratitude to everyone who has expressed an interest and pleasure at his return, explains that he will not be returning to active duty, and shares how he is happily anticipating civilian life. Pepper thinks it should be just the right note to strike to shame the newshounds into letting him alone afterward, while also still allowing the rest of the American public to be happy for him.

Steve doesn’t care about the rest of the American public. He asks Pepper three different times, as they discuss the content and form the conference should take, about whether she thinks it will be important enough to make it onto Canadian news channels. She assures him she thinks it will, a small, knowing smile tucked at the corners of her mouth he ignores to preserve his dignity.

He’s sure she knows exactly what he’s concerned with. There is precisely one person whose reaction Steve is interested in.

When Steve tells the world he’s glad that he’s been able to return to it, but that he looks forward to enjoying it again as just a man, the only person he’ll really be speaking to is Bucky. He wants Bucky to know how truly he means it and he figures an international press conference should at least go part of the way to convincing him that Steve is serious about it.

After the press conference, after his statement to the world…Steve’s plan isn’t as clear after that point. He supposes that’s when he’ll need to pick up his phone and say the words over again directly to Bucky, and hope that he hears him and believes him and wants him.

Steve can’t think beyond that at the moment. If Bucky doesn’t…doesn’t want Steve back…Steve’s mind comes up mercifully blank about the possibilities.

The uniform that Pepper decides on for him is a perfect replica of his SSR dress uniform, the olive coat and all his insignia just right.

“We don’t want you up there in the Captain America gear, I think, don’t want to tease people with the mental image of you taking up the shield again,” Pepper had commented as she handed him the garment bag, “but at the same time, we want to give you a little pomp and significance. I think this’ll tug the heartstrings the right way. Plus you’re going to look devastating, which can only help.”

She lays a hand on his arm, giving it a reassuring squeeze. “Remember, you’ll have the prompter as well as everything written down, so when in doubt, keep your eyes on that. But know that if you feel in the moment like you want to add anything more personal, don’t hesitate. I can always work with that.”

He’s pretty sure she means if he wants to make a spontaneous declaration of love—she’s hinted pretty forcefully a few times about Bucky since their initial conversation. He raises his eyebrows and glares, and Pepper raises her hands in surrender.

“Just saying you _can_ embellish, if the inspiration strikes.”

The morning of the conference (scheduled for late enough in the day to hit the evening news, Pepper explains) Steve dons the SSR coat and slacks.

He stands in front of the mirror for several minutes, tugging here and there and noting the small, slight discrepancies in it from his real one. It’s a very good replica—nobody would notice anything amiss but him. It’s just that by his body’s clock he was wearing the real one only a few weeks ago, so he notices things like the slightly-too-modern taper of the pant and the collar which oddly _doesn’t_ pinch when it normally made him feel like he couldn’t quite get a full breath.

There’s a few new medals on the chest from the last time he had it on, too, awarded posthumously, he supposes. He feels like he’s jangling conspicuously and considers taking a couple shiny things off and shoving them into his bedside drawer, but he’s certain Pepper would notice.

He goes to see Peggy, whose nurses have wheeled her out in her chair onto the wide veranda of the main house. It’s a gorgeous late-spring day, hinting heavily already at summer.

Peggy gasps when he sees him, hand going to her heart, “Oh—Steve!”

Steve’s heart plummets at the surprise on her face—she must be having a bad day, confused and alarmed at seeing him, and in his uniform, too. His face falls as he hesitates on the step, not sure if it would be best just to leave her to her nurses.

But Peggy waves a hand at him, beckoning him forward. “I’m—I’m sorry, I’m alright, I’m all here. You just…just startled me, is all, seeing you in that uniform. Haven’t set eyes on one of those in a long time.”

Steve’s shoulders relax at once and he steps forward to pull over a chair beside Peggy.

“Pepper thought it’d be good to remind people that I’m very old now even if I don’t look it,” Steve explains, leaning on the sarcasm to draw a twisted grin from her. “Vintage uniform to convince people I’m old enough for my pension.”

“Sounds quite clever, I’m sure she knows what she’s doing.” Peggy reaches for Steve’s hand, pressing his fingers between hers. “And so after today Steve Rogers will be a free man, and Captain America will be back on ice—as it were,” she adds as Steve groans. “And what will you do with your pension, Captain?”

“I uh…have a few ideas,” Steve says.

Peggy turns wide, innocent eyes toward him, an expression which he knows means trouble the moment he sees it.

“And tell me, does one of those ideas happen to have very startling blue eyes and a ruggedly handsome jawline?”

Steve gapes at her and Peggy grins, mischievous.

“I may be old Steve, but I know how to use the internet. I looked him up the day after you visited the first time. Do you know, I think he might even be prettier than you? I didn’t think that was possible.”

Steve laughs and teases, “Grandmother, what big eyes you have!”

Peggy scoffs, tossing her hair in a gesture that sends a small shard of glass shooting somewhere under Steve’s breastbone as he sees two Peggys in it—the frail but elegant woman before him with her long white curls and the one he left not so long ago, young and somehow more vibrant than anything around her with her shining brown waves.

“I want you to move on Steve, but I’d be damned if I didn’t make sure it was someone worthy of you.” Peggy says, “Plus, it’s hard to break the habit of spying when you’ve been at it as long as I have. I make no apologies.”

“Nor would I ask for any,” Steve grants her, then adds softer, “and I’m glad you approve.”

“So you are? Going to him I mean?”

Steve pushes down the nervous flutter in his chest. “I don’t know. I think…I hope—maybe? I gotta get through this today first, then figure out if he…if he even wants me to come back.”

“If he doesn’t he’s a damn fool or a coward,” Peggy says decidedly. “But he will. And you shall simply have to ask him to show you how to use a video chat once you’ve gone away with him, so that you can tell me all about it.”

“We’ll see,” says Steve.

*

He can hear the drone of voices from the other side of the door and it’s making Steve’s heart race like no tank or armed squadron ever could. He shifts anxiously from foot to foot, hands clasped in front of him.

“Relax,” Pepper says, putting one hand on his arm, her eyes still directed down at the cellphone in her other hand as she taps away. “Just remember that everybody in that room _wants_ to love you, they’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.”

“You don’t _know_ that,” Steve says in a pained voice, trying to shut out the noise and not succeeding.

Pepper shrugs, going back to typing on her phone with both hands. “Okay, how about instead: you can reasonably assume there has to be at least _one_ person in that room who wants to love you and will give you the benefit of the doubt, so just talk to them.”

Steve takes a deep sigh and squares his shoulders, trying to relax. Actually, he thinks, that isn’t totally terrible advice—he can’t argue with the logic. At least one person in there has to be on his side, statistically speaking, and hopefully more. Maybe their reporting is the one that Bucky will see.

Pepper clears her throat, and Steve looks over to see her reaching into her purse. “Speaking of which…” she says and Steve tries and fails to follow the line of thought. Her hand emerges with a plain white envelope. “This arrived for you today.” She holds it out and he takes it automatically. “I’m going to go check on a few things before we get started. You’ve got 10 minutes.” 

He nods, but Pepper is already making her way to the main room, the roar from the other side growing louder momentarily as she slips out the door.

Steve looks down at the envelope in his hands.

It occurs to him briefly that he isn’t sure how Pepper knew it was for him, since the outside doesn’t say his name or anything. But he brushes it away—maybe it came to her in person, or in an outer envelope or something. He slides his finger under the flap, tearing the top.

There’s something small and hard in it, which is what falls into his hand when he tips it open. Steve holds it up, inspecting it.

It’s a shard of a shell, rough and dull on one side and pearly and gleaming on the other. Steve’s heart trips. He reaches in and pulls out the folded paper that accompanies it, hoping against hope that it’s what he thinks it is.

Most of the white page is covered in a messy crosshatch of scribbles in different colored crayon. Steve knows immediately the chubby little fist that held them to make it and he feels his throat grow tight.

In the bottom right hand corner, a note in cramped handwriting stands out in black ink against the crayon.

_To remind you of us, with all our love._

All our love.

Steve realizes that an idiotic grin has taken over his face as he stares down at the page in his hands, but he can’t seem to make himself school his features into something more calm.

All _our_ love, Bucky said. Both of them.

Bucky loves him back? _Bucky loves him back._

His chest feels like he’s suddenly lacking a ribcage and his heart is flying apart without it. It feels like the first time jumping out of a plane without a parachute—only this time he doesn’t think his feet are ever going to touch the ground again.

“Ready?” Pepper’s voice breaks across his thoughts, poking her head around the edge of the door.

“Ready,” Steve says, painful grin still on his face as he hastily folds the shell into the page and tucks it into his jacket pocket.

He’s never been more ready for anything in his life. On the other side of this—just five or ten minutes of effort—Steve now knows that there’s something waiting for him. A whole life he’s only just beginning to allow himself to imagine—to long for with every particle.

Can he get a flight tonight? Steve wonders as he strides for the door, heart still soaring. No—he should still call first, be at least a _little_ prudent. He shakes his head at himself and his barely contained eagerness as Pepper gives him a quizzical smile. He rolls his shoulders, straightening the bottom of his coat.

Then he walks past her, into the brilliant flash of cameras and the excited surge of reporters’ voices calling to him from beyond the edge of the stage.

Steve steps forward in a bit of a daze. _Just get through this, it’ll be over soon_ , he thinks to himself.

“I’m going to be reading a prepared statement,” he says into the microphone, remembering how Pepper coached him. He leans back as it buzzes at him, but steadies as the noise levels out again and the crowd in front of him subsides a little.

“First, I’d like to thank everyone who has shown me such interest and kindness in this time,” he begins, eyes glued to the typed sheet in front of him and feeling like the words are coming from someone else.

“Returning to you all the way that I have is something I never dreamed of. I’ve spent these past weeks learning about this new century I find myself in, and trying to determine my place in it,” he pauses for a moment as the noise from the crowd surges again, people with microphones and tape recorders all shouting questions over each other until two of Pepper’s people convince them to settle down.

“I feel very grateful not only to have had the honor of serving my country,” he pushes forward over the hum, “but also now to be able to see the legacy of my efforts carried forward by so many who came after me. This is still a land of opportunity and as such I have spent careful time considering the opportunities now available to me…”

Steve pauses to take a breath, aware that he’s rushing through the stiff words of the speech and thinking that he’d better try to slow himself down. It’ll be over soon enough. His gaze roams out over the crowd, taking in the excited and eager faces of the reporters in the front, sweeping toward the hulking shapes of the film crews with their cameras in the back…

And catches on a small, bright red knit cap above a round little face looking up at him with wide green eyes.

Steve’s breath catches in his throat, his heart stopping altogether, and he keeps going just enough to lock his gaze with the bright silver-blue pair of eyes, framed by laugh lines, that’s looking right back at him.

_Bucky._

Steve breathes out heavily and he feels the foolish smile growing again on his face with nothing he can do to stop it.

“…my opportunities,” he continues, a little faintly, “and what I want from life now that I’ve got it back.” Steve halts, eyes fixed on Bucky’s face, splitting with its own answering smile as he bounces Alice on his hip.

A shaky laugh erupts from Steve’s throat and he crumples the paper containing the rest of whatever nonsense he’d meant to say and drops it to the floor beside him.

“What I want,” he says, voice strong again through his beaming smile, “which just so happens to be here at this very moment,” he flicks his eyes away from Bucky back to the confused sea of faces in front of him.

“I’m sorry, consider this my permanent retirement.”

Then Steve strides forward, hopping down from the edge of the stage and through the mass of mystified people still trying to understand what’s happening, not caring about anyone but Bucky and Alice.

He reaches them in a handful of thundering heartbeats, not breaking stride or hesitating when he does but sweeping both of them into his arms and burying his face between Bucky’s shoulder and Alice’s chubby neck. Steve feels her little hand patting his hair.

Then he pulls back and looks into Bucky’s face just for a beat, peering into his wide, surprised eyes before Steve’s hand finds the back of his neck and he pulls Bucky in for a crushing, enthusiastic kiss.

Behind them, there is a roar of a hundred voices raised all at once and Alice shrieks along gleefully, reveling in the din.

Steve doesn’t hear it, everything fading as Bucky—who’d stiffened momentarily when Steve’s mouth met his—relaxes into the kiss, leaning up to return it.

He breaks away, then grins up at Steve.

“You know Captain America just came out on live national television?”

Steve shakes his head, rubbing his thumb across the soft hair at the nape of Bucky’s neck with one hand and planting the other on Alice’s wriggling back.

“Not Captain America anymore,” he says.

Bucky scrunches his nose in a pleased smile, but his eyes suddenly look a little glassy, too.

“Okay,” he says, softly enough that Steve just hears him over the ruckus.

Behind them, Pepper’s people have moved to block the pair from the chaotic mass of reporters, all losing their minds. Steve keeps his hold on both of the Barneses, but turns his head just enough to see Pepper at the microphone, beginning to bring order to the scene.

“She doesn’t seem very surprised,” Steve comments as he watches her take control with the cool command of a general, then turns back to see Bucky huff a small laugh.

“Probably because she sent a private helicopter to collect me four hours ago.” He tilts up to press another quick kiss to the corner of Steve’s mouth. “Far as I know it’s waiting upstairs to take us back, too.” Bucky drops his eyes for a moment, then adds, “I mean uh, as long as I’m assuming right and that this incredibly dramatic public gesture means you’re coming with us.”

Steve raises his eyebrows, then begins teasingly, “I mean I dunno, I’ve got a bunch of errands still to do around town—”

Bucky cuts him off by leaning in for another fast, hard kiss. “Ass!” he says when he pulls away, and his eyes are crinkled.

“I love you,” Steve says, sliding his hand to cup the hard line of Bucky’s jaw.

“I love you, too,” Bucky replies fervently. 

“So, let’s get the hell out of New York, huh?” Steve asks, motioning with his head at the emergency exit door over Bucky’s shoulder.

Bucky beams. “Lead on, Rogers.”

They make their escape with Steve’s hand clutched at Bucky’s elbow.

Neither one looks back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from Ellie Goulding's Dead in the Water. 
> 
>  
> 
> _If I was not myself_  
>  And you were someone else  
> I'd say so much to you  
> And I would tell the truth  
> Cause I can hardly breathe


	5. Drown In This Love

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This Steve and this Bucky have become really special to me, and I hope they have to you too. They deserve the softest of epilogues.

**One Year Later**

“Daddy, what Papa doing?” Alice’s small, high voice drifts up to Steve as he leans with the paint roller as far up as his wing span lets him reach. _Damn_ , he thinks, _I’m going to have to go to town for that longer extender after all_.

“What does it look like he’s doing, lovebug?” Bucky asks her and Steve glances down the ladder to see both of them with their faces tilted up from the picnic blanket spread over the green grass.

“Iono!” Alice chirps.

“If I had to guess, Papa is trying really hard to fall off of his ladder despite our _many_ discussions about how dumb it is for him to do this project by himself in the first place, like he _needed_ something else on his plate this summer. Alice, did you know that there are people you can hire to paint your house for you?” Bucky asks, grinning up at Steve with his eyebrows raised.

Alice just laughs like he’s told a very funny joke. Two-and-a-half year old humor isn’t very sophisticated, Steve thinks.

“Alice,” Steve says, and Alice cocks her head at him, and the pigtails he combed her hair into this morning stick out at different angles with the expression. He leans back to center himself on the top rung of the admittedly wobbly and fully extended ladder. “Did you know that Papa is very strong?”

“Yah!” she agrees, nodding.

“Alice, did you know that it still hurts very much if you fall from a tall place even if you’re strong?” Bucky shoots back.

“Iono!” she says easily. “I don’t know” has been a favorite phrase for about a week now. It doesn’t seem to sway Bucky’s opinion, anyway.

“I’m almost done, Buck, promise,” Steve assures him. “And you can’t tell me it doesn’t look nice with a fresh coat of paint.”

“Gonna be all hidden by snow again most of the year anyway,” Bucky grouses good-naturedly.

Steve chuckles and starts climbing back down.

“Stubborn,” he remarks as he hops the last few rungs to the ground.

“You are,” Bucky shoots back.

“Very mature,” Steve comments dryly as he flops down beside Bucky on the blanket, stretching out his stiff shoulders from using the paint roller. “What’ll you say when Alice starts using that comeback on you?”

Alice, entirely too clever already for her own good, happily goes along with a bright, “You are!” She claps her hands when Steve laughs, please with the response and repeats, “You are Daddy you are!”

Bucky groans and flops back to the blanket as well, turning his head to meet Steve’s eyes with a rueful twist to his mouth. “Thanks for that.”

“Hey, that’s all you,” Steve grins. “I can’t wait until she’s a teenager and I’ve really got two of you in the house.”

“Hey, you know what, let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Rogers.”

Steve brings a hand to his chest in mock offense. “ _Excuse_ me, but that’s Rogers-Barnes to you.”

Bucky’s whole face crinkles in a smile as his expression softens despite himself, dropping the banter. “That’s right, can’t forget that.”

Bucky leans over and runs a hand through Steve’s hair, closing in to kiss him gently. Steve sighs into it, letting his eyes drift shut and enjoying the warmth of Bucky’s hand on his face and the sun soaking into their skin.

Steve opens them again at the feeling of something light and soft landing on him, and looks up to see that Alice is showering them with handfuls of grass and clover ripped industriously to shreds beside them.

“See the green!” she trills. Steve and Bucky trade a laughing glance.

“It _is_ green,” Bucky agrees. “What other colors are there? Do you see the flowers?”

“Uhhh,” Alice muses, following where he points and furrowing her forehead in thought. Then she brightens, “Peenk! Lallow! Peenk!”

Steve chuckles, sitting up and pulling her over into his lap where she twists, giggling. “That’s right! You have gotten very good at colors this month, missy. Do you think we should pick some of the pink ones to bring inside?”

“Yah!” Alice agrees, bobbing her head enthusiastically as she scrambles out of his lap again, a wiggly little monkey who spends most of these days in non-stop motion.

Bucky snorts. “Flower expedition is on you, Papa. I’m staying put—been trying to keep up with her all morning.”

“Hmm,” Steve says, getting to his feet. Then, “Nope!” as he swoops down to tug Bucky up beside him before he can protest.

Bucky grumbles, but brushes grass off of himself anyway and lets Steve take his hand as they set off after Alice across the bright green summer meadow behind the lighthouse.

They all three return bearing fistfuls of pink flowers, which Bucky sets to work putting into water in the handful of vases they own along with a few spare water glasses when they get back inside.

Alice meanwhile makes her way to her play corner, becoming immersed in an elaborate arranging of her stuffed animals, chattering away under her breath. She’s also donned every single necklace and ring (except the black one, obviously) from her Pretty, Pretty Princess game, so Steve imagines that she must be pretty happy for the time being.

Steve moves up behind Bucky where he stands at the sink trimming flower stalks and slips his arms around his waist, tucking his chin into the crook of Bucky’s neck.

The living room is bright and a soft breeze plays over them through the open windows. With summer so fleeting, they don’t hesitate to take full advantage of the mild air, leaving them open round the clock as long as it holds out. There’s ocean salt and a slight hint of fresh paint drifting in on it.

Bucky spins around in Steve’s arms, linking his own behind Steve’s back and tilting his face for a kiss. Their lips move lazily against each other for several minutes before Bucky flicks his tongue against Steve’s and Steve rocks forward to press Bucky closer against the edge of the sink. Steve brings his hand up to cup the back of Bucky’s neck, kissing him a little more intently, chasing his mouth for a few more moments.

A small snorting, snuffling sound and the beginnings of a cry break them out of their bubble. Bucky pulls back with a sigh, plucking the baby monitor from his back pocket and checking on the little screen.

“Three and a half hours,” Steve remarks, glancing at his watch. “That might be a record.”

“Just wait ’til a month or two when she stops the night feedings—you’ll think you’ve died and gone to heaven. Though I won’t say I haven’t appreciated having a partner with super soldier stamina for not sleeping this time around,” Bucky says, a half-smile quirking his mouth. “Whose lunch you want to be in charge of—Sarah or the big people?”

“Hmm,” Steve rocks forward and drops a light kiss on Bucky’s nose, “you got a preference?”

“I’ll do big people. I’m still a better cook and we’re the ones with the palette to care.”

Steve huffs, but he’s smiling anyway. “Deal.”

When Steve returns downstairs from the nursery with Sarah in one arm, Sarah’s wearing his favorite hat with the enormous bow on the forehead that he puts on her any time it seems like she’s in a good enough mood not to rip it off. He finds the front door wide open and Bucky and Alice outside again, industriously setting up a little picnic on the blanket they’d left in the grass.

“It was too nice out to stay inside, even long enough to eat,” Bucky says with a grin.

“Couldn’t agree more,” Steve replies, folding his legs up under him to sit cross-legged on the quilt.

Sarah stirs in his arms, blinking up at him owlishly with a comical, concerned look on her forehead. Steve scoops up the bottle Bucky warmed for her and her expression immediately clears as she starts eating, closing her eyes.

“Can this girl sleep or what?” Steve asks Bucky, eyes fixed on Sarah’s squishy little face. At three months she’s losing her newborn look and her cheeks are just starting to get adorably fat, her hands and elbows dimpling sweetly.

“Like Papa like daughter, I guess, let’s hope she never tries to beat your napping record,” Bucky jokes as he spreads cream cheese on a bagel for Alice. “Seriously though, she really can. I couldn’t get Alice to sleep more than an hour at a time during the day until she was about eight months old. Thought I’d lose my mind.”

“I sleep!” Alice chimes in, pleased with herself, “In my bed!”

“That’s right, angel baby, you sure do,” Bucky says encouragingly, handing her the bagel.

He leans over Steve’s shoulder to join him in watching Sarah for a moment, cradled in Steve’s big arm with her eyes closed contentedly as she makes delicious, happy little noises in her throat. 

Bucky turns his face to Steve and Steve looks back, meeting his eyes with the soft, almost dazed expression he gets with the baby—like he’s looking at the whole world through a soft Vaseline lens. Bucky loves it. Having somebody look at you like they think they must be dreaming is pretty potent, all the more so because that someone is Steve. Bucky knows he isn’t any better, when he gets caught watching Steve playing with or holding one of the girls, gentle with his strong, capable hands and earnest smile.

“Happy?” Bucky asks, unable to help himself.

“Very happy,” Steve says, voice dreamy.

“Love me?”

“You’re fishing, Buck,” Steve says, mouth quirking up lopsidedly.

“Yep. Tell me anyway, though.”

Steve puffs a laugh. “More than anything, you dumb dope.”

“Language.” Bucky laughs, cutting his eyes to Alice. She’s a sponge these days with any new word she hears and they’ve already had a few unfortunate missteps in banter than led to her acquiring some phrases they wish she hadn’t.

“How about you,” Steve asks, “you happy?”

“Yep.” Bucky nods.

“No regrets?”

Bucky shakes his head, smiling, and leans back on his elbows, tipping his face to catch the sun.

“Nothing? You’ve got everything you want?”

“All of it—every last thing.”

“Good.”

Steve watches Bucky for another minute luxuriating in the sun like a cat. Then his gaze roams to the other side of the blanket where Alice is engaged in deep discussion with her stuffed yellow rabbit. He thinks about how funny and grown up she’s getting with her chatter and her endless supply of questions about the world. Finally he looks back at Sarah, letting himself wonder what it will be like when she gets a little older—old enough to play with Alice, for the four of them to play games and pick flowers and explore all together. There’s so much to look forward to. Though for now he’s content to savor this, the brief moment where she’s squishy and pliant and utterly dependent, trusting them to take care of her.

And Steve’s enough for her. And he’s enough for Bucky and for Alice— for his family, just as he is.

And they are more than enough for him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from Icarus Falling's Ocean Deep 
> 
>  
> 
> _There is a cliff here and I know that we should jump_  
>  Where nothing matters besides what there is for us  
> Just take my hand now cuz nobody can see  
> And the mountains move before the sea

**Author's Note:**

> As always, I cherish hearing from you. Drop me a comment below and let me know what you think! 
> 
> Beta creds as always to @calendulae, and this time around as well for a THOROUGH polish by @itsmariemccurdy. 
> 
> I myself am still on tumblr and now also on twitter and would love to be befriended in either place!


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